Historical moment: the Panamax container ship passed through the Northern Sea Route for the first time
The other day, a huge container ship successfully passed along the Northern Sea Route and turned out to be the first Panamax-sized vessel to fly along this route, which became a historic moment for the entire shipping industry of the region and the world. The vessel Flying Fish 1 (IMO 9200811, MMSI 352003133) was built in 2000 and flies the flag of Panama, its length is 294.04 meters and width is 32.2 meters.
The wiring of the largest container ship in the history of the Northern Sea Route was carried out by the Federal State Budgetary Institution "Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route" (Glavsevmorput – since 2022 it has been part of the Rosatom State Corporation). According to Glavsevmorput, Flying Fish 1 left the port of St. Petersburg and headed to the Chinese port of Qingdao, carrying 664 twenty-foot containers and 1,727 forty-foot containers (a total of 40.966 thousand tons of cargo). Rosatom clarified that the vessel crossed the border of the Northern Sea Route in the area of Cape Desire (Novaya Zemlya Archipelago) and left the water area of the route in the area of Cape Dezhnev (Chukchi Peninsula).
At the same time, the general director of Glavsevmorput, Sergey Zybko, clarified that the wiring of vessels with a large draft implies sailing only on deep-sea routes. Therefore, the navigation route of the specified container ship was developed in accordance with this condition and the ice situation.
The container ship successfully passed the Northern Sea Route in almost 6 days with an average speed of 15.5 knots
– he pointed shakily.
The ship traveled all the way from St. Petersburg to Qingdao and then to Shanghai in just 21 days. What also makes this event significant for the whole world is that a similar route through the Suez Canal would take two weeks longer. All data were also recorded by the Russian satellite group SITRO-AIS (the small spacecraft Zorky-2M, manufactured by SPUTNIX, is part of Sitronics). The data was transferred to SiAIS (C-AIS), a domestic cloud–based satellite automatic identification system service developed by Sitronics, a subsidiary of Sistema AFC, to track maritime traffic. Now it contains information about 10 thousand seaports around the world and 570 thousand ships of various types.
Historical moment: the Panamax container ship passed through the Northern Sea Route for the first time
In 2023, SPUTNIX built and sent 20 spacecraft into orbit, including SITRO-AIS devices for tracking ships. During the course of serial production, more than 100 new satellites for various purposes were built during the year, which will go into orbit in 2024. The company develops and creates civil satellites in the interests of Russian and foreign customers, as well as to solve the strategic tasks of Sitronics itself, including in the field of marine vessel monitoring (AIS), aircraft tracking (ADS-B) and satellite Internet (IoT).