Page 5 - Flathead Beacon // 11.5.14

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Whitefish Father and Son Among Crew Hunting for Missing Malaysian Flight
NOVEMBER 5, 2014 | 5 W•O•R•D•S
of the Week
AN INDEX OF RECENT NEWSMAKERS
ELECTIONS
For analysis and results of of the 2014 general election, visit flatheadbeacon.com.
EBOLA
Kalispell Regional Medical Center disputed rumors last week that it had received a patient with “Ebola-like sys- tems.” Meanwhile, Gov. Steve Bullock said health officials would monitor people return- ing to the state from areas of West Africa affected by the virus.
OPPOSITION RESEARCH
A National Republican Sena- torial Committee researcher discovered the plagiarized college paper that derailed Democratic Sen. John Walsh’s campaign, the orga- nization’s executive director revealed last week. Walsh dropped out of the Senate race after The New York Times wrote about the find- ings in July.
WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE
Nov. 3 marked 100 years since women in Montana secured the right to vote. The state elected Jeannette Rankin as the first woman in Congress in 1916.
Deep-sea survey company searches for answers in Indian Ocean
By TRISTAN SCOTT of the Beacon
Jay Larsen and his 20-year-old son, Kolter, would normally be in Montana this time of year, carrying on a family hunting tradition while trekking across the high country in search of deer and elk.
Instead, the father-son duo is in pur- suit of something much bigger, which could affect hundreds of family members searching for answers.
Jay and Kolter are key members of a search crew on board the GO Phoenix, a vessel scouring the Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370), which disappeared March 8 while ferrying 239 passengers and crew- members from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China.
And while the Flathead Valley natives long to be home tracking elk sign through the wet November snow, the significance of their contribution to the search expedi- tion isn’t lost on either of them.
For seven months, family members of the missing passengers and flight crew have been waiting for answers buried in a watery abyss, and Larsen hopes his high- ly specialized sonar technology can help bring them to light.
Jay Larsen owns the Whitefish-based deep-sea survey company Hydrospheric Solutions LLC (HSI), and, as chief engi- neer of the sonar kit that the ship is tow- ing miles beneath the ocean surface, he has spent the last month mapping the undulating mountains and crevasses of the ocean floor, working round-the-clock to locate the missing flight in the remote southern Indian Ocean. His son, Kolter,
Crews on board the GO Phoenix, a search vessel scouring the Indian Ocean in search of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight, recover a highly specialized deep sea survey sonar device. Whitefish-based Hydrospheric Solutions LLC is among the crew searching for the flight, which disappeared in March. COURTESY PHOTO
an engineering student at Montana State University – Jay’s alma mater – joined the crew somewhat serendipitously as an elec- trical technician while taking a semester off college.
The sonar that HSI is towing 3.2 miles beneath the ship is called the SLH Pro- SAS-60, owned by SL Hydrospheric LLC, a company that Larsen still co-manages and co-founded in 2008 with the purpose of bringing the rarefied device to the deep- sea surveying market.
The Larsens’ company and ground- breaking technology emerged out of rela- tive obscurity when the 6,000-pound so- nar vehicle was used to help locate the F-1 rocket engines that powered Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket, which landed three American astronauts on the moon in 1969. On that expedition, Jay was an integral
part of the search and recovery team led by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
The Synthetic Aperture Sonar works by sending acoustic pings off the ocean floor to form images with a resolution much higher than conventional sonar technology, and Kolter has an intimate understanding of its nuts and bolts.
“Kolter had been involved with the sonar since the beginning, even helping me solder up power supply boards on our ping-pong table in the garage at points,” Jay said. “He has been out on vessels a few times but never anything close to this scale. So, he had about as good of a grasp on the system as anyone. He is fitting right in with the rest of the crew and doing a great job as an ET.”
See MH 370 PAGE 14
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