The last contact was on Wednesday at 03:00. Then the submarine of the Indonesian navy disappeared, somewhere deep in the dark waters of the island of Bali in the Pacific Ocean.
By evening, the Indonesian Ministry of Defense had detected only one possible sign of the missing vessel, which had 53 people on board: a broad oil slick found in the area where the submarine began diving north of Bali.
The oil slick could be evidence of the submarine’s distress due to a crack in the hull, first adm. Julius Widjojono, a spokesman for the Indonesian navy, said. Such cracks are extremely uncommon, but can occur with a sudden change in pressure, naval experts said.
The first request of the submarine, known as the KRI Nanggala-402, was for permission to descend to a deeper part of the Balisee to fire torpedoes for naval exercises, First Admiral Widjojono said. The area contains valleys that are at least 1900 to 2300 feet deep (or about 600 to 700 meters).
The request was granted, but contact with the submarine was subsequently lost.
According to a defense expert, which was built in Germany in 1977 and refurbished in 2012, the Nanggala was last “fully maintained” in May 2018.
The submarine, about 196 feet long and more than 19 feet wide, was built to hold 34 crew members, according to the specifications the fleet quoted during a previous training session. It is not clear why the vessel had more people on board during this torpedo drill.
“The quality of the naval crew is not in doubt, but the treatment of this submarine may need to be re-checked,” said Connie Rahakundini Bakrie, a military analyst at the University of Indonesia. “I am afraid there is no standard in maintaining the procedure.”
Two Adjournalist Widjojono used sonar from the Indonesian navy ships to search for the missing vessel. One of the ships was deployed earlier this year to search for the flight recorders of an Indonesian jet that crashed in January.
Navies from neighboring countries, such as Australia and Singapore, have been warned and will take part in the search in the coming days, Indonesia’s Defense Ministry said.
A country of thousands of inhabited islands, Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago nation. Its fleet is poorly funded, even because the country has to be infiltrated regularly by foreign fishing fleets and coastguards.
Submarine accidents are rare. In 2000, a Russian naval submarine sank to the seabed after an explosion on board. All 118 people were killed after rescue crews took days to gain access to the submarine, and the 23 sailors who survived the blast ran out of oxygen.
In 2017, a submarine of the Argentine Navy went missing with 44 people on board after an electrical breakdown. Its wreck was found a year later.
But miraculous rescues took place. In 2005, seven sailors aboard a small Russian navy submarine trapped in a fishing net were released just hours before they ran out of oxygen.
“I will cross my fingers that will get help from Australia and other countries,” she said. Bakrie, the Indonesian military analyst, said referring to the search for the missing Indonesian submarine. “Cross my fingers that the crew will all survive.”