By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter

The Navy will begin to operate its third 1,800-ton KSS-II submarine Tuesday after 18 months of sea trials.

The commissioning ceremony will be held at the Naval Operations Command in Busan, it said in a news release.

The third Type-214 submarine was named after Ahn Jung-geun, a Korean independence fighter who assassinated Japan's first resident general, Hirobumi Ito, in 1909 in retaliation for Japan's annexation of Korea.

The diesel-electric submarine, built by Hyundai Heavy Industries under technical cooperation with Germany's Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW), is expected to play a key role in sea denial to North Korean and other hostile forces, and anti-submarine warfare, Navy officials said.

The submarine is equipped with state-of-the-art torpedoes and submarine-to-surface missiles.

It has a maximum submerged speed of 20 knots and a crew of 40. One submarine costs around $1 billion to produce.

The 65.3-meter-long submarine is equipped with Air Independent Propulsion (AIP), which improves its underwater performance and gives it stealth capability.

It can submerge to depths of up to 400 meters and carry out underwater operations for as long as two weeks.

Its operational radius reaches Guam.

The ISUS-90 integrated sensor submarine system enables operators to deal with variable information and detect up to 300 targets simultaneously.

The Navy plans to create a submarine command by 2018. To that end, the Navy will launch six more Type-214 submarines by 2018 and build indigenous 3,000-ton submarines after 2018.

gallantjung@koreatimes.co.kr