Working for the Whitefish-based deep-sea survey company Hydrospheric Solutions, Missoula's Spencer Paddock spent 31 days as a sonar technician searching the floor of the Indian Ocean hoping to find the missing Malaysian airliner presumed crashed there.
MISSOULA, Mont. | The unexplained disappearance of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 – which vanished March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board after taking off from Kuala Lumpur – is one of the most shocking and sad mysteries in the history of aviation.
This past January, a Missoula man spent a month aboard a 300-foot boat looking for the lost aircraft, using sonar to scan the bottom of an unexplored expanse of the desolate southern Indian Ocean.
Spencer Paddock, 27, works for Geo-Marine Technology Inc., a Missoula company that specializes in marine geology, hydrographic and geophysics consultancy services.
For the search, Paddock was hired as a sonar technician by Jay Larsen, who owns Whitefish-based Hydrospheric Solutions LLC. That company specializes in deep-sea surveying.
Paddock had heard that Larsen built some “cutting-edge synthetic aperture sonar technology” with Raytheon and other investors.
“I called him about maybe mapping some lakes in the Seeley-Swan Valley just for a laugh, and he came back with, ‘Well, that sounds awesome, I’d love to do it, but I’m pretty busy with this airline thing,’ ” Paddock said.
Larsen had teamed up with a Maryland company and gotten a contract to conduct the search for Flight MH370. He told Paddock he needed experienced workers.
“It turned into six months of work for five guys from Missoula, all out there on this boat on 31-day hitches,” Paddock explained. "We flew into Perth, Australia, over New Year’s Eve. I woke up on Jan. 2 and we met up with the boat and headed 1,100 miles offshore. A lot of times, we were the only boat out there looking within 800 miles, so we were really hoping nothing went wrong.”
The boat, called the GO Phoenix, had 30 crew members.
“So the 10 marine crew were from Crimea, which was interesting because half of them were ethnic Russians and half of them were ethnic Ukrainians, so it was kind of like, ‘If you guys were at home right now, you’d probably be shooting at each other,’ but because we’re all on the same boat, literally and figuratively, they kind of get along,” Paddock recalled. “And then we had 10 Indonesians and 10 guys from North America, and four or five of them were from western Montana, which was pretty cool.”
Paddock worked 12-hour shifts, sitting in a room and interpreting data coming in from the sonar equipment, which was towed 7 kilometers behind the boat with a special cable and recorded information at depths of up to 5 kilometers.
“We were running the equipment, running the winch, flying the sonar and looking at the data,” he explained. “And we were kind of the first pass. So the data comes in in 70-second frames, so every 70 seconds it generates a new image. So you look at it and say, ‘Well, that’s not the plane’ and then you kind of wait. And another 70 seconds goes by, and you say, ‘Well, that’s not the plane.’ ”
The men had to be vigilant to keep the sonar from crashing into undersea formations.
“Basically, it’s like flying a kite underwater in reverse – trying to keep it up off the seabed,” he explained. “Like when you fly a kite, if there’s certain wind and you’re trying to keep it under a powerline. We had to make sure we kept the right altitude.”
The data they collected was also passed off to government representatives and geoscientists in charge of the search to make sure nothing was missed.
At nights, the guys would play poker, watch movies or go to the gym.
“The big joke is that working at sea is kind of like going to jail with a higher chance of drowning,” he said. “A couple days we had nice enough weather to play soccer on the back deck. You’re sitting in a container part of the time and the rest of the time you’re sleeping or walking on the deck doing preventative maintenance.”
The same company hired four other guys from western Montana to perform the same work, Paddock said.
Needless to say, they never saw the airplane – or anything else for that matter.
“It’s a pretty desolate stretch of ocean,” Paddock said. “It’s never really been used for shipping or anything like that. Where they think the best guess to where the plane is, is way away from anything. The thing is, the data they get out of that sonar is so good that if we went over that plane crash, we would know for sure.”
There are many conspiracy theories surrounding the disappearance of the airplane. Satellite data shows that it flew for at least six hours after the last voice contact with air traffic control, but the Malaysian government has said that its flight path ended in the southern Indian Ocean and that all lives were lost.
“It’s definitely out there,” Paddock said. “There’s guys from western Montana that are out there looking for it right now, and they may have come across something interesting in the past two months.”
Original article can be found here: http://rapidcityjournal.com
NTSB Identification: DCA14RA076
Scheduled 14 CFR Non-U.S., Commercial
Accident occurred Saturday, March 08, 2014 in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia
Aircraft: BOEING 777 - 206, registration:
Injuries: 239 Fatal.
The foreign authority was the source of this information.
The Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) has notified the NTSB of an accident involving a Boeing 777-200 that occurred on March 8, 2014. The NTSB has appointed a U.S. Accredited Representative to assist the Malaysian DCA investigation under the provisions of ICAO Annex 13 as the State of Manufacturer and Design of the airplane.
All investigative information will be released by the Malaysian DCA.
No comments:
Post a Comment