delusionofgrandeur

It has been not so widely reported in the last few days that a Chinese Type 039 Submarine (NATO reporting name “Song Class”) buzzed the USS Kitty Hawk on the 27th of October while the Kitty Hawk was on maneuvers in the western Pacific Ocean.

The event seems to have caused much consternation for NATO and the US Navy as apparently the Song Class had sneaked up on the 7th fleet unnoticed before surfacing with 5 nautical miles of the US Supercarrier.

This is bound to be causing a few headaches at the US Navy as 5 nautical miles is well within the Song Class’ firing range for both torpedos and anti-ship missiles. The Song Class carries Yu-4 torpedos with a range of ~8 nautical miles at up to 30 knots and the YJ-8 anti-ship cruise missile which has a 43 nautical mile range at just under the speed of sound and a ‘hard-to-hit’ flight profile which comes in down to 3m above wave-height.

The Chinese, of course, deny that they were shadowing and intercepting the Seventh Fleet. I can just imagine the look of anguish as the Chinese boat captain realised that he had accidentally surfaced in the middle of an American Carrier Group

Now, my theory as to how the Chinese managed to creep up on the Seventh Fleet is thus: The Song Class firstly has a latest-generation design prop which makes it particularly quiet. Secondly, the Song probably makes a different sound to a Russian submarine. The reason this is critical is that I’ll bet the class Hollywood image of a steely-eyed sonar operator being able to detect a Russian sailor breaking wind on a submarine 5 miles away is a bit of a fallacy. What is more likely is that they have a computer listening to the sonar at all times running some pattern-matching software. Now, that’s all good and well if they encounter the sound of submarines that the computer has patterns for but if the computer doesn’t have a pattern for a Chinese Sub, perhaps it can’t interpret it’s presence at all.

I wonder if the solution really could be as simple as giving a new pattern to the sonar computer?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Ramblings, Tech News.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.