KN SAR ARJUNA 229

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Course/Position

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Hope for missing submarine and its crew slim

The 'Arjuna 229' was one of the Indonesian ships searching for the submarine 'KRI Nanggala 402' that was likely to have sunk too deep to retrieve, making survival chances for the 53 people on board slim. The diesel-powered boat was participating in a training exercise on April 21, 2021, when it missed a scheduled reporting call. An oil slick and the smell of diesel were located near the starting position of its last dive, about 60 miles north of the resort island of Bali, although there has been no clear evidence they were linked to the submarine. Indonesia’s navy chief of staff, Admiral Yudo Margono, told on April 22 that oxygen in the submarine would run out on April 24 by 3 a.m. Rescuers had found an unidentified object with high magnetism in the area, and officials hoped it was the submarine. The Navy believed the submarine sank to a depth of 2,000-2,300 ft — much deeper than its collapse depth, estimated at 656 ft by South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, that refitted the vessel in 2009-12. The company upgraded much of the submarine's internal structures and systems, but lacked information about the vessel because it has not been involved with any work on the ship in the past nine years. Frank Owen, secretary of the Submarine Institute of Australia, said the submarine could be too deep for a rescue team to operate. Most rescue systems were really only rated to about 600 metres- They can go deeper than that because they will have a safety margin built into the design, but the pumps and other systems that are associated with that may not have the capacity to operate. So they can survive at that depth, but not necessarily operate. Report with photos: https://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/national/19250616.missing-indonesian-submarine-may-sunk-deep-reach/