Expert guides on voyage planning, route optimization, and shipping industry analysis.
Maritime Insights is the analytical layer of Fairway ETA. The calculator and data hub price the next voyage; this section reads the conditions around it — why a freight rate is moving, how a regulatory cycle reshapes routing decisions, where the market and the physical fleet have drifted out of sync.
The work is organized into eight categories — Freight & Chartering, Vessels & Fleet, Trade & Insurance, Fuel & Emissions, Market, Geopolitics, Routes, and Regulation. Category detail, voice notes, and editorial standards are documented at the bottom of this page.
Gas carriers are named by capacity, not by a canal — VLGC just means Very Large Gas Carrier. But the canal constraint did not disappear when it left the name. Part of the LPG fleet is built to fit the original Panama locks and part is not, and whether a ship holds its cargo under pressure or under refrigeration is decided almost entirely by how big it is.
On 20 August the Panama Canal postponed two scheduled draft reductions and cut daily transit slots instead. These are not two pieces of news — draft is a depth problem, transits are a water-budget problem, and only one can be spent to fix the other. The trade moves the cost from cargo holds to the auction, and the two bills land on entirely different businesses.
Every hull carries a disc and six lines. They decide how much cargo the ship may legally load, and the answer changes with the season, the sea and where she is going. What TF, F, T, S, W and WNA mean, and why one of them applies only to smaller ships.
VLCC capacity: 200,000–320,000 DWT, roughly 2 million barrels per voyage. Suezmax: 120,000–200,000 DWT. Aframax: 80,000–120,000 DWT. Each tanker size class is defined by a physical constraint — a canal width, a port draft, a terminal limit. This guide covers every class from MR to ULCC: tonnage, dimensions, cargo capacity, typical routes, and per-barrel economics.
Bulk carrier size names look technical but they're really shorthand for trade patterns. A Capesize means iron ore. A Panamax hints at grain or coal. About 70% of the world's seaborne iron ore moves on Capesize alone — which is why a single commodity can move the entire BDI. A plain guide to the size labels that quietly organize the dry bulk fleet.
Why the Cape became the default Asia–Europe lane, how war-risk insurance flipped the economics, and what voyage planners should optimize beyond distance.
Freight & Chartering covers TCE, Worldscale, FFAs, demurrage, charter parties, and the Baltic indices. Vessels & Fleet covers ship types, fleet structure, shadow fleet, and yard capacity. Trade & Insurance covers bills of lading, P&I clubs, classification societies, and war risk insurance. Fuel & Emissions covers bunker prices, ECA zones, carbon capture, and the energy transition. Market reads freight rates, index divergence, and shipping cycle diagnostics. Geopolitics tracks how chokepoint events become freight costs. Routes covers route economics, distance comparisons, and ETA methodology. Regulation covers IMO frameworks, MEPC outcomes, trade policy, and compliance impacts.
Standards are kept on the about page. The short version: we cross-verify against primary sources before publishing, we paraphrase rather than quote at length, and we date articles so corrections can be tracked. If a number turns out to be wrong, we update the article rather than letting the original stand.
