Korea — Sohn Wonyil Class Pilot Training Equipment Developed with Domestic Technology

The pilot train­ing equip­ment for the top-of-the-line 1,800-ton Sohn Wony­il-class sub­ma­rine crew to fur­ther improve their pilot­ing capa­bil­i­ty was devel­oped with domes­tic tech­nol­o­gy. This will lead the Navy to expect to fur­ther strength­en its sub­ma­rine war­fare capa­bil­i­ties.

Source: MND, Repub­lic of Korea

“After more than four years of hard work, we had devel­oped with domes­tic tech­nol­o­gy the pilot train­ing equip­ment for the Sohn Wony­il class sub­ma­rine such as the hard­ware and soft­ware for the sub­ma­rine and deliv­ered them to the Navy,” said the state-run Defense Acqui­si­tion Pro­gram Admin­is­tra­tion on April 9. 

The devel­op­ment of the pilot train­ing equip­ment for sub­marines requires a high lev­el of tech­ni­cal skills, because the oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment in which the equip­ment is used must be the same as that of actu­al warfare. 

For this rea­son, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced coun­tries either refused to trans­fer the devel­op­ment tech­nol­o­gy to us or demand­ed heavy roy­al­ties of tech­nol­o­gy transfer. 

As a result of this, for exam­ple, most of the coun­tries that pur­chased Ger­man sub­marines have oper­at­ed Ger­man-man­u­fac­tured train­ing equipment. 

In that sense, this new­ly equip­ment means so much to us in that the equip­ment has been devel­oped for the Navy to be able to con­duct exer­cis­es when it is impos­si­ble to do on a real sub­ma­rine or to improve its capa­bil­i­ty to take emer­gency action as well as to pilot submarines. 

We expect that this devel­op­ment will cause var­i­ous ben­e­fits. For exam­ple, it makes a lev­el of safe­ty high­er because we can car­ry out the exer­cise on land rather than in the water. 

In addi­tion, we can reduce oper­at­ing costs for sub­marines by $4.5 bil­lion and export the equipment. 

Since 2004 when the Navy built a drill field in which var­i­ous exer­cis­es are con­duct­ed in a real war­fare envi­ron­ment made by com­put­er graph­ics and sim­u­la­tions, it has devel­oped the abil­i­ty to pilot sub­marines in any weather. 

It also cur­rent­ly con­structs a com­pre­hen­sive mar­itime train­ing cen­ter, sched­uled to be com­plet­ed next year with­in the Sec­ond Fleet site in Pyeong­taek, to enhance its anti-sub­ma­rine oper­a­tions capabilities. 

The train­ing cen­ter com­pris­es an anti-sub­ma­rine oper­a­tions exer­cise sec­tion and a sub­ma­rine pilot­ing skills one. The anti-sub­ma­rine train­ing sec­tion was designed to fur­ther boost the abil­i­ty to locate and iden­ti­fy sub­marines and to oper­ate anti-sub­ma­rine weapons. 

The oth­er train­ing cen­ter is aimed at rein­forc­ing the pilot­ing skills to over­come the com­pli­cat­ed water­ways and bad weath­er con­di­tions of the West Sea. 

Source:
Min­istry of Nation­al Defense[MND], Repub­lic of Korea