Posted on 02/09/2021 4:48:15 AM PST by mowowie
The diesel-electric attack submarine was surfacing when it impacted the 51,000-ton commercial vessel off the Japanese coast.
A collision between a Japanese submarine and a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean has resulted in injuries to at least three submariners, according to initial reports. The incident occurred today at 10:58 AM local time, around 25 miles southeast of Cape Ashizuri, in the waters off the island of Shikoku, which lies southwest of Japan’s main island of Honshu.
The submarine involved was the first-in-class Soryu, one of 11 of these diesel-electric attack submarines active with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF). The submarine entered service in 2009 and was taking part in a routine training exercise at the time of the collision.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedrive.com ...
Not a submariner, but a US sub had a similar incident in 2001 when performing an emergency surfacing drill. It came up below a Japanese fishing vessel off Hawaii, resulting in the boat sinking and killing 9 passengers. There are details in the Wiki describing what they checked on before surfacing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehime_Maru_and_USS_Greeneville_collision
The Soryu? No way.
We sunk it at Midway
Nothing a few hundred rolls of good quality Duct Tape won’t patch up.
I don’t think I would sail on a ship named Soryu.
Now that’s a wingding!
It’ll buff out
I would imaging that passive sonar would have noticed the not-particularly-stealthy cargo ship if anybody had really been listening.
Count on it!
I have seen two submarine surfacings in the western Pacific, back in the 1980s. Each time, the sub sent up white smoke flares that burned on the surface for at least five minutes and a red paraflare before the sub appeared. The correct response for any ship encountering these pyros was to keep her propellors turning and give a wide berth to the smoke cannister location.
Somebody is probably looking for a new job.
Just a bit of trivia...this ship is not the first to bear the name ‘Soryu’. There was one before it, an aircraft carrier....
Which the US Navy beat the hell out of before she was scuttled and sent to the bottom in the Battle of Midway.
Ping to sub thread...
Not really.
Yes! But only if you are a long way off, listening to the sides or off the stern of the approaching merchant ship. This one, at 51,000 tons, is fairly small, and so has relatively less mass and cargo spaces and voids between the engine room (noise source) and the bow of the cargo ship.
A bigger one, (100,000 tons to 250,000) tons are actually very, very quiet when you are just trying to listen to their engine noise while your submarine is front of the bow.
Well, that IS when you get hit by the surface ship: You (the submarine) are trying to stay under control going to periscope depth at 3-4 knots so you can get your periscope up and verify that there are in fact no surface ships in the way. But if the sub's keel is (for example) 66 feet, then the top of the sail is 10-15 feet from the surface. Very, very easy to get hit under the wrong circumstances.
That there are so few sub-surface collisions (maybe 1 per decade for thousands of surfacing evolutions by every submarine the world's fleets) is a mark to the effectiveness of the underwater search and sonar checks now being done.
These cargo ships are winning every encounter with a warship.
Maybe we need to take a look at that.
Ha ha! (Had to google it)
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