The only submarine in service with the Polish Navy stopped firing due to problems with torpedo tubes.
As the military blog bmpd writes on April 21, the Soviet-built Orzel submarine, which has been used since 1986, has failed.
The Polish media, in particular the Komputerswiat portal, noted in early April that the military had discovered the problem last month. So, all six 533-mm torpedo tubes of the submarine were out of order due to prolonged downtime, the material says. There was a swelling of the guide shoes and O-rings inside the vehicles, which made it impossible to load torpedoes into them.
Among other things, the external torpedo-loading device has become unusable, without which torpedoes cannot be loaded on board. The experts discovered malfunctions in the Murena-E torpedo firing control system, which is responsible for reloading the devices inside the submarine.
On March 22, the Polish Navy announced a tender for the repair of all out of order equipment of the submarine, offering the performers 428 thousand euros. But a week later, the competition had to be canceled due to the lack of applications for participation. On April 2, the tender was resumed, its results are still unknown. The Polish media expressed doubts about the success of the repair of the submarine.
Orzel submarine created for the Polish fleet at the Krasnoye Sormovo plant in Nizhny Novgorod under the 1977 Soviet-Polish agreement. The equipment was transferred to the Polish side on April 29, 1986, it was the first export submarine of Project 877.
The Polish fleet included five small diesel-electric submarines of the Kobben class built in the 1960s, which the country purchased from Norway in 2002. However, three of them failed in 2017-2018, and two more in March 2021. Orzel turned out to be the only active submarine of the Polish Navy.
In August 2020, it was reported that Poland was discussing the acquisition of two submarines for its fleet from Sweden. Each of these submarines is armed with six 533mm bow torpedo tubes and three 400mm bow torpedo tubes. Moreover, the Swedes themselves consider the Södermanland and Östergötland submarines obsolete and worn out.