The Argentine navy is looking for one of its submarines after it lost contact with the vessel off the country’s coast, the military service said Friday.
The ARA San Juan submarine was last spotted Wednesday in the San Jorge Gulf roughly 432 kilometers (268 miles) off the east coast, the navy said. At least 44 crew members were on board, state-run news agency Telam reported.
Crews are searching for the vessel by air and sea near its last known location in the Atlantic Ocean, navy spokesman Enrique Balbi told reporters.
“We have ordered all terrestrial communication stations along the Argentine coast to carry out a preliminary and extended search of communications and to listen in to all the possible frequencies of the submarine,” the navy said in a statement Friday.
The US Navy will deploy a P8-A Poseidon maritime aircraft to Argentina on Saturday, the US Naval Forces Southern Command said in a statement.
The 21-person crew had been in El Salvador supporting “counter-illicit trafficking patrol operations,” the agency said in a statement. The aircraft was deployed to the western coast of Africa when a Korean ship sank in April and more recently, it was sent to Dominica in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
NASA will also help in the search with a P-3 Orion aircraft, agency spokeswoman Katherine Brown told CNN. She said the US plane was “already in Argentina on a scientific mission.” The P-3 is a turboprop aircraft capable of long-duration flights, according to NASA.
The submarine had been traveling from far southern Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego archipelago to its home base in Mar del Plata, a city hundreds of miles to the northeast.
“The submarine knows that if it does not have communication with land for this long, it has to surface,” Balbi said.