Hai Kun sea trials will end only when CSBC reports to legislature, shipbuilder's chairman says

The sea trials of Taiwan's first domestically built submarine, the Hai Kun, will be counted as finished only when shipbuilder CSBC Corp. submits its report to the Legislative Yuan, the company's chairman, Chen Cheng-hung, said on 9 October. Speaking on a current affairs programme on the Public Television Service, Chen said testing was not yet complete, and that because lawmakers had required a report once every test was passed, word that the trials were done would come out when that report was filed.

Only a few items remain in the final stage, including an overnight endurance run, the Liberty Times reported. The boat has been to sea 23 times for testing and is already behind its original delivery date, United Daily News said.

No immediate handover

Chen cautioned that completing the trials would not mean the navy takes the submarine straight away. A handover needs the navy's agreement, he said, and there is further work to do first, including acceptance paperwork, correcting remaining deficiencies and even decorating and cleaning the boat, as well as planning a delivery ceremony, which would be announced once it was settled.

He added that every country keeps its submarine building quiet from design through construction and testing, and that militaries usually release figures linked to a boat's performance only at the very end, though he said how reliable such figures are, and how much is left vague, is a separate question. Because the programme is classified, he said he would neither confirm nor deny outside comments about the Hai Kun.

Reply to the deaf claim

Chen also responded indirectly to Kuo Hsi, a former navy adviser, who has argued that faults in the boat's integrated platform management system, or IPMS, have left its flank sonar unable to link with the combat system, and who described the submarine as deaf. Chen said he would not comment on what had happened with any particular piece of equipment, but that in testing some items pass smoothly while others are not yet good enough, and that the cause is not always the equipment itself but how well linked systems work together.

He compared the project with Taiwan's high-speed rail about 20 years ago, whose opening was delayed by about half a year because it was a complex engineering system combining technology from different countries. Individual components can be sound, he said, yet still need adjusting once they are combined, and testing took longer than expected.

Chi Tung-yun, chairman of the Taiwan Security Development Association, has rejected Kuo's call to replace the IPMS, saying the combat management system is not part of it and that the trials have reached the last mile, where faults should be fixed through system integration. Citing Chen's account, Chi said all six torpedo tubes had each completed mechanical and system-link checks during in-harbour testing, and that the remaining tubes could be verified with live exercise firings after US-made MK-48 heavyweight torpedoes are delivered at the end of the year.