Great video! Though there is a super minor nitpick in your animations: You can't stack two 20 ft containers on top of one 40 ft container (most 40 ft containers don't have a strong enough center to support the load). You can stack a 40 ft on two 20 ft containers, however. I hope no one is relying on TH-cam comments for critical container logistic lessons but if you *are*, there you go.
1:44 That 348808 label is actually wrong, it's clearly pointing at tier 6 and not 8, so it should say 348806 instead. Can't wait for this to be the most boring correction in the next HAI mistakes compilation
One more thing, that middle two numbers there is the row, that means "88" is the 44th row on the port side(even on port, odd on starboard), 45th if there is a row "00" in the middle. How wide would that ship be if the containers' width is 8ft?
Shout out in particular to the the animators for this video! I guess Sam should at the very least unchain them and let them see sunlight for about 10 minutes
Who let an animator set up an alt account?!? We give animators access to the internet for research and they use it to create alt accounts to advocate for greater freedoms? Seems we are going to have to cancel pizza night as punishment.
Back in the day, my father was an officer on container ships -- small ones by today's standards, but they looked pretty big to 10-or-so-year-old me on those occasions I got to go onboard. This was before computers were ubiquitous, so the loading plan had to be worked out *by hand*. In fact, one of my memories is my dad playing with his new home computer to see if he could write some software to help with the process. He never got particularly far with it -- it's actually a Hard Problem, and if he had, we'd be rich and all that. But I thought I'd share a childhood memory with the comments section anyway.
For non-mathematical folk, Hard Problem means NP-Complete, which essentially means that large versions of a Problem get too complex for computers to solve quickly. Container ship cargo layout looks like a variation of the Knapsack problem with more restrictions, and as such is NP-complete. The idea of "completeness" refers to the idea that, given enough analogy and translation, you can turn one type of problem into another in the same difficulty level. For context, cracking your bank's encryption, mining bitcoin, predicting the weather, and the entire field of logistics are all NP-complete. Since solving one NP-complete "quickly" means solving the others by an analogous method, such a solution would make you a trillionaire and simultaneously upend nearly every security measure in computing. Quantum computing potentially "solves" NP-complete, which is why people are researching it in the first place. Clarification: That "analogy" is typically referred to as the Boolean Satisfiability problem. It's just converting a given type of problem to a series of true/false checks like 20+ Questions. If your problem can produce a yes/no answer, it probably can be converted. "NP" means non-polynomial time. Polynomial is to Non-Polynomial as the boardgame Battleship is to Chess. If every move opens up more possibilities, it's NP. We can only approximate NP-complete solutions, not guaranteed to get the best outcome.
@@adissentingopinion848 Great summary. I'm familiar(ish) with the field so it's hard (small h) for me to truly gauge, but this _feels_ like it's a good explanation for those not already familiar.
Shipping line employee here 👋🏼 I work directly with the traffic, marine operations and vessel planning sides of the business and can honestly say this video very accurately explains this process in a very detailed, summarized and fun way. A few more factors are involved of course, which is the max tonnage capacity of a ship, and the difference between nominal capacity (number of slots across all bays) vs. working or operating capacity, meaning not all slots can be filled since shippers usually load as much as they can up to the payload of the container, usually just under 40 tons each, so the ship’s max tonnage is reached before filling up all slots. We also take into account the max draft restriction at each port in the ship’s route, so if the ship follows a 7-port route, we have to make sure the max weight does not make the ship sink deeper than each port’s maximum draft so that the ship does not run aground or hit any coral reefs on the seabed. Qingdao, Shanghai, Los Angeles, New York, all have different levels of depth, and containers are both discharged and loaded at each port in the rotation, so the process is even more insanely complex. Thank you, HAI, for this video! Very fun and interesting, and I’ll probably use it to train new hires in the future if you don’t mind 😁
Sorry to nit pick, but in your Thumbnail Diagram, the Oxidizer would be stored on the opposite side of the ship, not above the flammable liquid cargo. That way, if the flammable liquid combusts, the flames don't travel up and interact with the Oxidizers. Also see IMDG, DOT, and IATA regs, preferably the 2024 editions but if you don't wanna spend money you can practice with a legacy version.
As somebody who writes software for planning containers on a ship, this is pretty much dead on. There are loads of extra intricate details that were left out (such as shearing forces, and optimizing for how containers are stacked in the terminal, dealing with hatch covers, lashing, multi crane loading operations sequencing, and a bunch more) but this is actually a pretty darn good beginner overview.
i study logistics in sweden so we have a dangerous cargo course. The one thing that surprised me is that Hay is not classified as dangerous cargo in the ADR-s book when transported on road, but if you transport if by sea its not allowed under any circumstances since its highly flammable and very hard to extinguish on the open ocean
french driver, hay in enclosed spaces is an adr, classed as an oxidizer because it produces flamable gasses, its usually why you see driven hay on an open bed and not in a trailer.
It not only produces flammable gases, it also heats up in the process making it susceptible to spontaneous combustion. Only when the hay is dried out sufficiently is it safe to store. In the wrong conditions it can be so dangerous that several countries mandate you measure the temperature of large hay storages and alert firefighters when a threshold is exceeded, because if they are called after a fire breaks out, your storage building will be gone by the time they arrive.
fun fact, Avocado is probably one of the most annoying thing to move since they need a very special container with a fail proof refrigeration since they need to be transported at a very spesific tempeture. Hence why so many smuggles hide drugs in refrigeration units in Avocado containers since its almost never checked since its very much rare for it to fail
Reminds me of one ship where I sailed electrician (responsible for reefer maintenance) with four containers full of blood for military hospitals in Germany. They told me in advance that every other reefer on the ship was expendable if I needed to scavenge something to keep the blood boxes at setpoint. It was a bit nerve-wracking.
My dad actually works with stuff like this. He even has a certificate for arranging transportation for hazardous materials, although he says it's more of a hassle than it's worth.
Sorting and planning is actually still mostly done by hand. Obviously it is done in software but there is not actually any software that allows you to enter all your containers and gives you the perfect (or even a good) placement for each container
Software engineer for stowage planning applications here: yep, definitely NP-hard, although there are some good heuristics to optimize by. Ship computers are indeed old crap with essentially a single software supplier dominating the market, the situation at terminals is slightly better.
I would argue the shipping container is one of the top 10 inventions of the 20th century. Shipping used to be a labour intensive process to load and unload loose cargo. Thefts and damages were frequent. With the shipping container, trade and logistics become a standardized matter and much more convenient. With economics of scale, transport costs plummeted. And all of a sudden, it makes more sense to trade with another country for resources and products rather than waging a war to plunder them! Cheap trade means products become highly accessible and people's standards of living improved. Overall, the shipping container enhanced globalization and has played a unsung role in maintaining world peace!
Please wendover use your research to track ships that Spain denies entry to because they’re carrying weapons to a country committing crimes against humanity. 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸 viva Spain.
Another really important factor in all of this is that shipping things is charged by weight, so clients are rewarded for lying and claiming their containers are far lighter than they really are. Very few ports/countries have the resources to manually weigh every single thing. Investigations have shown that a good percentage of lost containers and accidents are because of this kind of weight fraud. Like this video shows, one overly-heavy container can topple a whole bay like dominoes.
Almost every modern port can get approximate or "Good enough" weights from the cranes or lifters that pull the containers off trucks/rail and into the storage sections of the container yard or onto the boat itself. A large majority of modern ports also include a weight in motion system or a weighbridge at the entry point of the terminal that takes an accurate weight of the truck and trailer either at each axel grouping or across the entire vehicle for longer weigh bridges, which is used to provide further estimates for container weights. Also ocean based shipping is usually always charged volumetrically for ISO containers based on the size and type of the container, not the weight.
I am an chief officer onboard a container vessel who is in charge of ship stability and loading, what we normally do is we usually keep sum buffer from the limit values to be safer and we also check the ship’s draft after loading to compare with the values calculated before, if they match then probably all is good.
as a third year nautical student (ship captain studies) i'd say this video is very nice, and more or less exactly what we had to study for our ship loading courses. I can tell you, the process of loading cargo with respect to offloading ports, weight distribution, and IMDG codes(separate dangerous goods from each other) is indeed time consuming af.
Whoever is mixing the audio can we please turn town the music. I don’t mind him talking fast, but it’s hard to understand because the music is distracting. This hasn’t been an issue in the past. 😢
@@TheAechBomb Depends on your environment and how well you hear. On top of that, I just really have to ask, what does it add? It's extra work, potentially extra licensing fees, for what? The narration is what's important, so if the background music is noticeable or distracting so that it makes it harder to hear the narration, then it's a problem. But if it's not noticeable, then what's the point of having it there in the first place? On the pros/cons scale, to me it just seems to be almost entirely cons with few pros.
You should have had a segment for the breakbulk shipments, that is even more fascinating for the planning and logistics aspect of container shipping. -someone who works for project cargo in one of the top liners.
Yeah I agree. I'm currently in a dual training ship to get a qualification to work in shipping and seeing a video about this niche topic is really cool! Though I work at a management company so cargo very much stays theory for me for now
Agreed. I process Waybills for Caterpillar and a good portion of their equipment is breakbulk. Always wondered how they ship those massive earth-mover machines.
20' and 40' containers while being the most common are not the only ones. 45' and 30' are also quite widespread, and tanktainers often come in sizes of 22'-26' (they fit into a 20' slot however protrude either on one or both sides so you'll need to keep that space empty).
Then there's also 20 and 40' flat racks that are standardized to fit into the appropriate slot but are mostly used for out of gauge product that protrudes above or to the sides of the slot
@@basscadia I've heard the Japanese have a 5' variant, which must be easier to get down narrow streets but still leaves me skeptical that it's a practical size.
There are also 30 foot and 45 foot containers in addition to containers differing in height by a foot. You actually show a few 45 foot boxes at 1:10 they're on the top row above the 40 foot boxes over the M.
This logistics stuff and the way you present them is absolutely fascinating! I could watch an hour long documentary on this! Like I NEVER thought about this.
So, wait, you left out something that might have been really interesting: What are the mechanics of getting all that information from the containers 2:57 and arranging them somehow on the ship? (It doesn’t look like those numbers are scannable like a QR code.) How do they get fed into “somewhere” (I assume some computer app)? Does the shipper wait until all the containers are at the port to get that information or does it have that information in advance? Does it wait until all the containers are at the port to start loading them? How are the containers arranged at the port (e.g., if the containers that should go on the bottom in the ship are “at the bottom” in some stack at the port, all the containers on top of those have to be moved to get to them)? How does all that work?
Not only the Planners from the Port Terminal where the vessel will berth, but the Planners from each of the shipping lines and the crew on board the vessel have information on all the cargo in the containers and tanks. They all have to receive the manifest from who is renting the space on the vessel to ship their cargo.
Hold it right there Sam! At 1:44, when your showing the container loading charts, the top number (348808) is misplaced. It shows 3488*06*s place, 3488*08* is one spot to the right of it. Looking forward to seeing this on the next "correcting another years worth of HAI oopsies" 😁 Loving your videos and looking forward to the next season of Jet Lag! Now, on with the video!
For the mistakes video, around 0:38, you said "International Standards Organisation"; ISO, after Greek "isos" for "equal", they settled on ISO because "International Organisation of Standardisation" would've caused confusion if transalated, e.g. French becomes OIN. IOS is how you "say" it (in English) but it's written ISO :)
Oh wow, this is amazing! I've clearly found the nerdiest comment section on YT and I am HERE for it! Plus, there's enough quirky humour in the video that no topic could ever truly be boring (but, of course, I did click on a video called "how to organize a container ship" before knowing how it was presented, so the fun presentation is obviously just a bonus).
thank you so much for covering this topic! i was writing a mafia AU fanfic and needed the characters to locate a stolen object inside a shipping container at a port, but i could never quite connect the logistics behind how they would track down where it is. much thanks HAI!!!
@icantthinkofagoodusername5564 its an AU of the otome game "band camp boyfriend". my old band friends and I played it a while ago as a joke to relive the old band kid memories i guess. I started writing it as a joke bc at the pre-release of the game there were only 6 entries on ao3 under that fandom and I wanted to populate it with some classic AUs for future readers. I've actually written almost all of it out but never posted it bc I didn't get around to proofreading it b4 I went off to uni lol. but thanks to this video I can fill in some plotholes!!!
For those interested in learning more about this and related topics, I highly recommend the channel Casual Navigation! Great (interesting, well-animated, and easily digestible) vids on all things shipping 😊
I'm truly disappointed that Sam didn't ship his correspondent Amy in a container ship so we could get some firsthand footage of being inside a container. What's the state of reporting even coming to these days?
I didn't expect that the first time Valencia, Spain, is mentioned in this channel was about cargo shipping, and not about the devastating floods we had some weeks ago. Also, the position of "Valencia" at 0:10 is too way to the North (well, the bubble is in the right place).
2:07 are the bay numbers that are multiples of four skipped to ensure that the full-lenght containers have even numbers and half-containers odd, or is there another reason there?
I'm a former stowage planner for the port of Singapore. What's described here is only the tip of the iceberg. We also need to cater for port efficiency, other odd sized containers e.g. 45' containers, out-of-guage cargo, flat-racks and ship peculiarities. Thankfully, there's software to help us. And yes, you cannot stack 2 x 20' containers on a 40 footer.
3:16 would this even be possible? the ship would be stopping between Los Angeles and Oakland, two US ports. Wouldn’t that mean they need to be US registered or am I misunderstanding that one maritime law
Correction - not the Suez canal but the Gulf of Aden, which is the gateway to the Suez canal and is currently terrorized by the Houthi terror group, which makes access to the Suez canal practically impossible, even though the canal itself is safe to use. I bet that if somebody watches this video 10 years from now without remembering the current situation they will be totally baffled about why would somebody go around the continent instead of using the canal
Pirates aside, containerships nowadays are actually getting so huge that they no longer fit through Panama and Suez. These ships are called Capers because they always go around the SA and Africa capes.
Just understanding how we load aircraft (passenger, freighter, etc) makes the information in this video intuitive even if I hadn't thought too much about it before. Weight and balance, center of gravity, types of material and how they interact with other types, where containers go based on order of disembarkation, and other factors equally apply to airline baggage/cargo loading as well. Slight critique for Sam though: mischievous is three syllables, not four.
It's a pretty common word, and in my whole life I've only ever seen it spelled or heard it pronounced with -ious. I think this is an example of the dictionaries not keeping up with the real-world evolution of the language.
@Xezlec It just seems odd and inefficient to add a syllable that isn't there, and for no reason. Mis-chiv-ous. Easy. Mis-cheev-e-ous. Weird and unnecessary. It's similar to how some people pronounce nuclear "nuke-u-lar". It doesn't add a syllable but it's like "have you ever actually looked at the word? Nu-clear. Done."
As a Jet Lag: The Game subscriber, I was very shocked that a newsletter I received related to my work pointed me to a video by Sam. I know this is also his channel, but it still caught me off guard.
Fun tip. If the ship is passing through pirate waters, why not have a few “special” containers that are actually filled with outward blasting explosives, triggered by the captain when the pirates climb over the rail.
We just visited about a dozen of the top bars in singapore and absolutely loved Fura (plus opposite Native, making it a very simple hop over to the next). One of our favourite cocktails of the whole trip was in Sago House, but they change the menu weekly! It was the thai style one called Gaeng Som and absolutely wonderful.
I'm so happy that you put outside correspondent amy into a shipping container on a container ship so she could accurately model it all in blender, you should give her some food and sunlight
small nitpick as a container guy -- while vessels are loaded with port of discharge in mind, they're typically segregated by bay, and not by height. In your example LA wouldn't normally be stowed on top of Oakland, but rather in separate bays. This segregation by bay, rather than by height allows for a higher crane intensity (more cranes working the vessel) at each individual port, which leads to shorter port stays.
At 5:07 you can see a little hazardous material placard with red and white stripes. That is for flammable solids. 5:49 Is a hazardous material reference sheet that, as he describes, dictates what chemicals can or can't be stored next to each other. One of my previous employments was hazardous waste transportation, so I was keenly interested to hear the stipulations of transporting hazardous materials overseas
One of the facts about industrial shipping that I’ve always found funny is, provided you have the funds, can put literally anything you want in a shipping container, have it picked up and shipped around the world, and dropped off in the exact same spot.
I have a feeling this is 80% automated with some human oversight, as taking a spreadsheet full of containers with all their specs and organizing them based on a preset algorithm is really not that complicated, provided you have enough compute power.
this video might actually be pretty useful. About half of mym family works at the port of Antwerp. I think one of my uncle's job is even to plan out the layout of cargo ships
Hi at 1:44 You have the number sorted as Bay TIer and Row but at 2:35 the Row and Tier are switched. Now I don't know which one is correct. :( For the Mistakes Video.
0:52 Actually, those containers aren't rectangles. Rectangles are 2 dimensional shapes, but containers are 3 dimensional. The correct term is rectangular prism or cuboid.
You don't only need to care that in the final position the ship is upright and doesn't break apart. You also need to care about that while loading, because if you exceed a certain roll angle you won't be able to load more containers. And one more thing - you can't twist the ship either. If you load heavy stuff in port bow and starboard aft you might end up with upright shift with good pitch but it will be getting twisted like a wringled towel.
Tetris is really about speed, not careful thought. As the great Jonas Neuebauer put it, "People always think I’m the one to call when they’re packing a suitcase or organizing a storage unit-and if you want that suitcase filled in 10 seconds or less, I am your man."
Would you like to know more? There's a nice channel called Casual Navigation that touches on Container ships that... Lose containers into the ocean and 'why' they might fall off the ship in the 1st place. They have a few videos on the topic, all of them are around 6-8 minutes long XD
organizing a container ship involves a complex interplay of strategic planning, technological application, and strict adherence to safety standards. This intricate process is vital for the seamless movement of goods across the globe, underscoring the importance of precision and coordination in maritime logistics.
A computer is probably not going to find the optimal solution, but it can find a good approximate solution in a reasonable amount of time which attempts to minimise the number of crane movements. It's an optimisation problem in the end.
Great video! Though there is a super minor nitpick in your animations: You can't stack two 20 ft containers on top of one 40 ft container (most 40 ft containers don't have a strong enough center to support the load). You can stack a 40 ft on two 20 ft containers, however. I hope no one is relying on TH-cam comments for critical container logistic lessons but if you *are*, there you go.
This is good info
Wait so all 20 fts have to go at the very bottom?
@@-syn9or only stack 40ft containers on 40ft ones
thanks bro saved me here
Boy I hope somebody was fired for that blunder
1:44 That 348808 label is actually wrong, it's clearly pointing at tier 6 and not 8, so it should say 348806 instead.
Can't wait for this to be the most boring correction in the next HAI mistakes compilation
I thought I was the only one to noticed
I can already hear him saying "This label was suppose to point here and not here" in half a second before proceding to the next small mistake.
Even more boring would be to point out that he called them rectangles, while they are, in fact, parallelepipeds (or cuboids).
Boy I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder
One more thing, that middle two numbers there is the row, that means "88" is the 44th row on the port side(even on port, odd on starboard), 45th if there is a row "00" in the middle.
How wide would that ship be if the containers' width is 8ft?
Shout out in particular to the the animators for this video!
I guess Sam should at the very least unchain them and let them see sunlight for about 10 minutes
I would go so far to say they deserve at least 15 minutes of sunlight.
I wouldn’t say unchain….just taken for a walk. Don’t want to risk them escaping and we lose this quality ya know.
He doesn’t need to. They get enough sunlight for the season in the next race around somewhere doing something
@@jstan5802 they always get sunlight they are stuck in a greenhouse there you don't need energy for light.
Who let an animator set up an alt account?!? We give animators access to the internet for research and they use it to create alt accounts to advocate for greater freedoms? Seems we are going to have to cancel pizza night as punishment.
Back in the day, my father was an officer on container ships -- small ones by today's standards, but they looked pretty big to 10-or-so-year-old me on those occasions I got to go onboard. This was before computers were ubiquitous, so the loading plan had to be worked out *by hand*. In fact, one of my memories is my dad playing with his new home computer to see if he could write some software to help with the process. He never got particularly far with it -- it's actually a Hard Problem, and if he had, we'd be rich and all that. But I thought I'd share a childhood memory with the comments section anyway.
For non-mathematical folk, Hard Problem means NP-Complete, which essentially means that large versions of a Problem get too complex for computers to solve quickly. Container ship cargo layout looks like a variation of the Knapsack problem with more restrictions, and as such is NP-complete. The idea of "completeness" refers to the idea that, given enough analogy and translation, you can turn one type of problem into another in the same difficulty level. For context, cracking your bank's encryption, mining bitcoin, predicting the weather, and the entire field of logistics are all NP-complete. Since solving one NP-complete "quickly" means solving the others by an analogous method, such a solution would make you a trillionaire and simultaneously upend nearly every security measure in computing. Quantum computing potentially "solves" NP-complete, which is why people are researching it in the first place.
Clarification: That "analogy" is typically referred to as the Boolean Satisfiability problem. It's just converting a given type of problem to a series of true/false checks like 20+ Questions. If your problem can produce a yes/no answer, it probably can be converted. "NP" means non-polynomial time. Polynomial is to Non-Polynomial as the boardgame Battleship is to Chess. If every move opens up more possibilities, it's NP. We can only approximate NP-complete solutions, not guaranteed to get the best outcome.
@@adissentingopinion848 Great summary. I'm familiar(ish) with the field so it's hard (small h) for me to truly gauge, but this _feels_ like it's a good explanation for those not already familiar.
@@adissentingopinion848thank you!
Cool he was trying to code back then.
@@adissentingopinion848 Good summary.
7:03 I mean, it's almost like listening to you talking about bricks. And you know how much we live bricks
they are similar shaped so we can say he likes boxes.
Bricks!!!!!
Don't fix the typo 😂 we don't just love bricks, we live bricks
Shipping line employee here 👋🏼 I work directly with the traffic, marine operations and vessel planning sides of the business and can honestly say this video very accurately explains this process in a very detailed, summarized and fun way.
A few more factors are involved of course, which is the max tonnage capacity of a ship, and the difference between nominal capacity (number of slots across all bays) vs. working or operating capacity, meaning not all slots can be filled since shippers usually load as much as they can up to the payload of the container, usually just under 40 tons each, so the ship’s max tonnage is reached before filling up all slots.
We also take into account the max draft restriction at each port in the ship’s route, so if the ship follows a 7-port route, we have to make sure the max weight does not make the ship sink deeper than each port’s maximum draft so that the ship does not run aground or hit any coral reefs on the seabed. Qingdao, Shanghai, Los Angeles, New York, all have different levels of depth, and containers are both discharged and loaded at each port in the rotation, so the process is even more insanely complex.
Thank you, HAI, for this video! Very fun and interesting, and I’ll probably use it to train new hires in the future if you don’t mind 😁
Sorry to nit pick, but in your Thumbnail Diagram, the Oxidizer would be stored on the opposite side of the ship, not above the flammable liquid cargo. That way, if the flammable liquid combusts, the flames don't travel up and interact with the Oxidizers. Also see IMDG, DOT, and IATA regs, preferably the 2024 editions but if you don't wanna spend money you can practice with a legacy version.
Nits are disease carriers, so pick away!
This is brilliant, thanks!
You do know its just a thumbnail and not actual ship loading plans, yeh?
@@John...44... You do know that being smart and correct is better than being dumb and wrong, yeh?
here before a ship captain makes a video debunking this and showing that he just randomly drops them all in there
They're actually shaped like Tetris pieces. Most of them are the S shapes
If they let captains have any control over this then thats exactly what they would do
@@javen9693 I know this is in jest but they wouldn't. Captains as well as most people have a tendency to not want to die.
As not a captain I can confirm
As somebody who writes software for planning containers on a ship, this is pretty much dead on. There are loads of extra intricate details that were left out (such as shearing forces, and optimizing for how containers are stacked in the terminal, dealing with hatch covers, lashing, multi crane loading operations sequencing, and a bunch more) but this is actually a pretty darn good beginner overview.
i study logistics in sweden so we have a dangerous cargo course. The one thing that surprised me is that Hay is not classified as dangerous cargo in the ADR-s book when transported on road, but if you transport if by sea its not allowed under any circumstances since its highly flammable and very hard to extinguish on the open ocean
french driver, hay in enclosed spaces is an adr, classed as an oxidizer because it produces flamable gasses, its usually why you see driven hay on an open bed and not in a trailer.
Don't they 'super compress' hay & haul by ship ?
It not only produces flammable gases, it also heats up in the process making it susceptible to spontaneous combustion.
Only when the hay is dried out sufficiently is it safe to store. In the wrong conditions it can be so dangerous that several countries mandate you measure the temperature of large hay storages and alert firefighters when a threshold is exceeded, because if they are called after a fire breaks out, your storage building will be gone by the time they arrive.
Grain is well known to be flammable too, so farm silos can be dangerous if flames are introduced. I'd imagine it's similar with hay.
@@Jack-ne8vm that I don't fully know since I passed the class by the smallest margine 🤣
3:03 Los Angeles is spelled Los Angelos(for the mistakes video)
The destination of that container was clearly several Hispanic guys named Angelo, apparently.
Legally distinct for trademark reasons
thank goodness someone else noticed
@@timseguine2 Yo, Angelo
@@SKAOG21 Every Angelo in the nearby 5km vicinity: You rang?
4:57 "These containers could contain almost *anything* "
Even Amy?!
Even Amy, though that just might be human smuggling.
@@marcusdurr1223 that depends on the purpose of shipment.
How else do you think this video was researched, they smuggled Amy on a ship in a container
Almost _Amy_thing !
That assumes Amy can even be contained.
fun fact, Avocado is probably one of the most annoying thing to move since they need a very special container with a fail proof refrigeration since they need to be transported at a very spesific tempeture. Hence why so many smuggles hide drugs in refrigeration units in Avocado containers since its almost never checked since its very much rare for it to fail
Live tropical fish are even more annoying than avocados
Imagine as a chief officer getting your day ruined by some avocados😭
Reminds me of one ship where I sailed electrician (responsible for reefer maintenance) with four containers full of blood for military hospitals in Germany. They told me in advance that every other reefer on the ship was expendable if I needed to scavenge something to keep the blood boxes at setpoint. It was a bit nerve-wracking.
One for the corrections video: the 20ft containers at 2:30 should be labelled quarter as container.
I was really disappointed the 40' wasn't "container" to set up the "half as container" joke :(
@@SleepyHarryZzz if i don't se that in the "every mistake we made in 2024" video i will be very disappointed
@@SleepyHarryZzz Agreed!!
I’m immensely disappointed that there is no shipping container Tetris shirt available for sale
Right? I do need a new shirt or two.
Seriously! Sam, I would buy it in a heartbeat, as long as it has the HAI logo on it.
My dad actually works with stuff like this. He even has a certificate for arranging transportation for hazardous materials, although he says it's more of a hassle than it's worth.
For anyone curious, at the time of release said ship is at Gioia Tauro port in Italy
I beg your pardon, any date that discussed shipping logistics sounds AMAZING to me, not lame at all!
This needs to be ina correction video!
And as with almost all complicated puzzles. A computer from the 80's that somehow still works probably handles this sorting problem.
And it's probably written in FORTRAN and there's one dude in his 60s who's about to retire who still knows how the whole thing works.
Sorting and planning is actually still mostly done by hand. Obviously it is done in software but there is not actually any software that allows you to enter all your containers and gives you the perfect (or even a good) placement for each container
I think this might actually be an NP-hard problem.
@@grammar_antifa Hey, don't throw shade at FORTRAN just because everyone loves it and its MPI calls ;-)
Software engineer for stowage planning applications here: yep, definitely NP-hard, although there are some good heuristics to optimize by. Ship computers are indeed old crap with essentially a single software supplier dominating the market, the situation at terminals is slightly better.
I would argue the shipping container is one of the top 10 inventions of the 20th century.
Shipping used to be a labour intensive process to load and unload loose cargo. Thefts and damages were frequent. With the shipping container, trade and logistics become a standardized matter and much more convenient. With economics of scale, transport costs plummeted. And all of a sudden, it makes more sense to trade with another country for resources and products rather than waging a war to plunder them!
Cheap trade means products become highly accessible and people's standards of living improved. Overall, the shipping container enhanced globalization and has played a unsung role in maintaining world peace!
Not even a minute in, and they already doxxing a container ship.
How about this:
As of November 19, 2024, at 16:00 UTC, the MSC IRINA is in port at Gioia Tauro, Italy.
@@macmedic892how about now?
@@macmedic892 I'm calling the cops!
Please wendover use your research to track ships that Spain denies entry to because they’re carrying weapons to a country committing crimes against humanity. 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸 viva Spain.
Another really important factor in all of this is that shipping things is charged by weight, so clients are rewarded for lying and claiming their containers are far lighter than they really are. Very few ports/countries have the resources to manually weigh every single thing. Investigations have shown that a good percentage of lost containers and accidents are because of this kind of weight fraud. Like this video shows, one overly-heavy container can topple a whole bay like dominoes.
Can't the cranes loading the ship weigh containers as they do so?
Almost every modern port can get approximate or "Good enough" weights from the cranes or lifters that pull the containers off trucks/rail and into the storage sections of the container yard or onto the boat itself. A large majority of modern ports also include a weight in motion system or a weighbridge at the entry point of the terminal that takes an accurate weight of the truck and trailer either at each axel grouping or across the entire vehicle for longer weigh bridges, which is used to provide further estimates for container weights. Also ocean based shipping is usually always charged volumetrically for ISO containers based on the size and type of the container, not the weight.
Yeah even in the era of VERMAS/VGM, this is so rampant it's not even funny.
I am an chief officer onboard a container vessel who is in charge of ship stability and loading, what we normally do is we usually keep sum buffer from the limit values to be safer and we also check the ship’s draft after loading to compare with the values calculated before, if they match then probably all is good.
as a third year nautical student (ship captain studies) i'd say this video is very nice, and more or less exactly what we had to study for our ship loading courses. I can tell you, the process of loading cargo with respect to offloading ports, weight distribution, and IMDG codes(separate dangerous goods from each other) is indeed time consuming af.
Whoever is mixing the audio can we please turn town the music. I don’t mind him talking fast, but it’s hard to understand because the music is distracting. This hasn’t been an issue in the past. 😢
The rise in distracting music over clips has been used to evade copyright, but you guys do so much work by making all of your own content.
The worst trend to develop on TH-cam because of just how pervasive it is.
I've seen so many complaints about the music, but I can hear him just fine
@@TheAechBomb Depends on your environment and how well you hear.
On top of that, I just really have to ask, what does it add? It's extra work, potentially extra licensing fees, for what? The narration is what's important, so if the background music is noticeable or distracting so that it makes it harder to hear the narration, then it's a problem. But if it's not noticeable, then what's the point of having it there in the first place?
On the pros/cons scale, to me it just seems to be almost entirely cons with few pros.
Seconded
4:49 WHO WROTE THAT
Someone who is probably still participating in No Nut No November…
And I feel their pain
according to the description, it’s ben, which given his time on jetlag, i can totally believe
I immediately and uncontrollably yelled BEN WHAT THE FUCK. I think my wife downstairs got concerned. God I love that man.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
What are you on about? Am I missing something?
You should have had a segment for the breakbulk shipments, that is even more fascinating for the planning and logistics aspect of container shipping.
-someone who works for project cargo in one of the top liners.
Yeah I agree. I'm currently in a dual training ship to get a qualification to work in shipping and seeing a video about this niche topic is really cool! Though I work at a management company so cargo very much stays theory for me for now
Agreed. I process Waybills for Caterpillar and a good portion of their equipment is breakbulk. Always wondered how they ship those massive earth-mover machines.
20' and 40' containers while being the most common are not the only ones. 45' and 30' are also quite widespread, and tanktainers often come in sizes of 22'-26' (they fit into a 20' slot however protrude either on one or both sides so you'll need to keep that space empty).
Then there's also 20 and 40' flat racks that are standardized to fit into the appropriate slot but are mostly used for out of gauge product that protrudes above or to the sides of the slot
48's and 53's too. But are typically used for trucking and rail only. There's also the odd 10'
@@basscadia 10ers are cursed and I refuse to acknowledge them
@@basscadia I've heard the Japanese have a 5' variant, which must be easier to get down narrow streets but still leaves me skeptical that it's a practical size.
Jet Lag challenge idea: Load a container ship and sail it from Seattle to Singapore without it sinking.
3:05 where's los angelos?
Literally unwatchable. smh my head
Just north of san digo.
south of oxard, north of oceansigh and san digo as the person above me mentioned
@@FutureSoap you're... shaking your head your head?
New city build before GTA6 released
There are also 30 foot and 45 foot containers in addition to containers differing in height by a foot. You actually show a few 45 foot boxes at 1:10 they're on the top row above the 40 foot boxes over the M.
This logistics stuff and the way you present them is absolutely fascinating! I could watch an hour long documentary on this! Like I NEVER thought about this.
So, wait, you left out something that might have been really interesting: What are the mechanics of getting all that information from the containers 2:57 and arranging them somehow on the ship? (It doesn’t look like those numbers are scannable like a QR code.) How do they get fed into “somewhere” (I assume some computer app)? Does the shipper wait until all the containers are at the port to get that information or does it have that information in advance? Does it wait until all the containers are at the port to start loading them? How are the containers arranged at the port (e.g., if the containers that should go on the bottom in the ship are “at the bottom” in some stack at the port, all the containers on top of those have to be moved to get to them)? How does all that work?
Not only the Planners from the Port Terminal where the vessel will berth, but the Planners from each of the shipping lines and the crew on board the vessel have information on all the cargo in the containers and tanks. They all have to receive the manifest from who is renting the space on the vessel to ship their cargo.
Hold it right there Sam!
At 1:44, when your showing the container loading charts, the top number (348808) is misplaced. It shows 3488*06*s place, 3488*08* is one spot to the right of it. Looking forward to seeing this on the next "correcting another years worth of HAI oopsies" 😁
Loving your videos and looking forward to the next season of Jet Lag!
Now, on with the video!
For the mistakes video, around 0:38, you said "International Standards Organisation"; ISO, after Greek "isos" for "equal", they settled on ISO because "International Organisation of Standardisation" would've caused confusion if transalated, e.g. French becomes OIN. IOS is how you "say" it (in English) but it's written ISO :)
that’s a good find
I was about to make this comment plus there are also 45 foot containers
@bloopshloop7553 I just got this wrong in Networks (learning about RFCs and stabdards) enough times that this stuck with me even outside of uni 😂
@samuelzackrisson8865 I wouldn't know 😂 Just as long as my food is on the shelves, and my A pillar on backorder from Germany gets here in time too 😂
Wow! I’ve worked in the industry for years and have been saying it wrong!
Oh wow, this is amazing! I've clearly found the nerdiest comment section on YT and I am HERE for it! Plus, there's enough quirky humour in the video that no topic could ever truly be boring (but, of course, I did click on a video called "how to organize a container ship" before knowing how it was presented, so the fun presentation is obviously just a bonus).
thank you so much for covering this topic! i was writing a mafia AU fanfic and needed the characters to locate a stolen object inside a shipping container at a port, but i could never quite connect the logistics behind how they would track down where it is. much thanks HAI!!!
What is the AU about? Can I read it?
These six digit numbers are likely very cryptic outside their context.
@icantthinkofagoodusername5564 its an AU of the otome game "band camp boyfriend". my old band friends and I played it a while ago as a joke to relive the old band kid memories i guess. I started writing it as a joke bc at the pre-release of the game there were only 6 entries on ao3 under that fandom and I wanted to populate it with some classic AUs for future readers. I've actually written almost all of it out but never posted it bc I didn't get around to proofreading it b4 I went off to uni lol. but thanks to this video I can fill in some plotholes!!!
Big missed opportunity not naming big containers "Container Productions" and keeping small ones "Half As Container"
As someone currently studying to be a ships engineers i love this video
Vessel planner for a stevedore company here, this video is spot on kudos Sam!
The acronym was created by Chekov, the W stands for wessel
Is that the Chekov with or without a gun?
This is such a good video and topic, very entertaining & very nerdy and half as container
Thanks Sam Ben Adam & Animators
For those interested in learning more about this and related topics, I highly recommend the channel Casual Navigation! Great (interesting, well-animated, and easily digestible) vids on all things shipping 😊
I'm truly disappointed that Sam didn't ship his correspondent Amy in a container ship so we could get some firsthand footage of being inside a container. What's the state of reporting even coming to these days?
That brings back memories. I was a master mariner with Maersk and switched to IT, working on LoadStar, and writing the code for IMDG cargo checks 😊
I didn't expect that the first time Valencia, Spain, is mentioned in this channel was about cargo shipping, and not about the devastating floods we had some weeks ago.
Also, the position of "Valencia" at 0:10 is too way to the North (well, the bubble is in the right place).
2:07 are the bay numbers that are multiples of four skipped to ensure that the full-lenght containers have even numbers and half-containers odd, or is there another reason there?
I'm a former stowage planner for the port of Singapore. What's described here is only the tip of the iceberg. We also need to cater for port efficiency, other odd sized containers e.g. 45' containers, out-of-guage cargo, flat-racks and ship peculiarities.
Thankfully, there's software to help us. And yes, you cannot stack 2 x 20' containers on a 40 footer.
Thanks!
3:16 would this even be possible? the ship would be stopping between Los Angeles and Oakland, two US ports. Wouldn’t that mean they need to be US registered or am I misunderstanding that one maritime law
Yes, it would, and there are a fair few US-registered container ships, they just tend to be expensive compared to the international standard
The vessel could have fully unloaded at Los Angeles and then go to Oakland to load. This would as far as I know, not violate the Jones Act.
2:45 I was today years old when I learned that containers are on the inside of the ships aswell and not only on the deck 😂
The Count von Count joke was phenomenal! 😂
(Also, the “Stew” joke)
3:43 “The cranes might not want to move containers anymore😂
I was really confused why you had an ad at the end, but finally realized I accidentally watched it on TH-cam instead of Nebula!
0:04 Wow that Middle East debacle has everyone spooked about the Suez Canal 😂feel bad for Egypt
Correction - not the Suez canal but the Gulf of Aden, which is the gateway to the Suez canal and is currently terrorized by the Houthi terror group, which makes access to the Suez canal practically impossible, even though the canal itself is safe to use.
I bet that if somebody watches this video 10 years from now without remembering the current situation they will be totally baffled about why would somebody go around the continent instead of using the canal
@@taldru6 They'd probably assume it was during the time there was a ship stuck in the canal or something like that.
@@taldru6 i doubt conflict will end after ten years
@@taldru6that was my first question watching it now
Pirates aside, containerships nowadays are actually getting so huge that they no longer fit through Panama and Suez. These ships are called Capers because they always go around the SA and Africa capes.
Oh ship, new vid!
Just understanding how we load aircraft (passenger, freighter, etc) makes the information in this video intuitive even if I hadn't thought too much about it before. Weight and balance, center of gravity, types of material and how they interact with other types, where containers go based on order of disembarkation, and other factors equally apply to airline baggage/cargo loading as well. Slight critique for Sam though: mischievous is three syllables, not four.
It's a pretty common word, and in my whole life I've only ever seen it spelled or heard it pronounced with -ious. I think this is an example of the dictionaries not keeping up with the real-world evolution of the language.
@Xezlec It just seems odd and inefficient to add a syllable that isn't there, and for no reason. Mis-chiv-ous. Easy. Mis-cheev-e-ous. Weird and unnecessary. It's similar to how some people pronounce nuclear "nuke-u-lar". It doesn't add a syllable but it's like "have you ever actually looked at the word? Nu-clear. Done."
the animations on this were awesome
As a Jet Lag: The Game subscriber, I was very shocked that a newsletter I received related to my work pointed me to a video by Sam. I know this is also his channel, but it still caught me off guard.
The 3d models were insanely good!
Truly love your videos, super informative and delivered in a way I connect with. The longer form wendover also. Truly appreciate your work
As someone who has done this - this is a great video for the general audience!
Fun tip. If the ship is passing through pirate waters, why not have a few “special” containers that are actually filled with outward blasting explosives, triggered by the captain when the pirates climb over the rail.
whoever put "I'm lazy okay" for illegal weapons... this up vote is for you!
its like an excel sheet but on steroids.
feels like a wedding seating plan tbh
An excel sheet taken to the third dimension. An excel sheetoid.
How does this affect the distribution of oven fired bricks in Paraguay?
Im surprised nobody has made some sort of logic game out of this
2:41 was trying to sort out the rows from the tiers then I realized they were colour coded! Thanks for that.
Great video, Sam of HAI, Son of Sam of Wendover Productions
We just visited about a dozen of the top bars in singapore and absolutely loved Fura (plus opposite Native, making it a very simple hop over to the next). One of our favourite cocktails of the whole trip was in Sago House, but they change the menu weekly! It was the thai style one called Gaeng Som and absolutely wonderful.
This was the most elaborate ground news advert
he missed the chance to call the 20 foot containers "quarter as container" 2:30
I'm so happy that you put outside correspondent amy into a shipping container on a container ship so she could accurately model it all in blender, you should give her some food and sunlight
The intro instantly called to mind Ze Frank: "these puffins got some stuffin' for your puffin muffin". Highly recommended.
small nitpick as a container guy -- while vessels are loaded with port of discharge in mind, they're typically segregated by bay, and not by height. In your example LA wouldn't normally be stowed on top of Oakland, but rather in separate bays. This segregation by bay, rather than by height allows for a higher crane intensity (more cranes working the vessel) at each individual port, which leads to shorter port stays.
6:28 you missed an opportunity to call the big container "Whole as container"
At 5:07 you can see a little hazardous material placard with red and white stripes. That is for flammable solids.
5:49 Is a hazardous material reference sheet that, as he describes, dictates what chemicals can or can't be stored next to each other.
One of my previous employments was hazardous waste transportation, so I was keenly interested to hear the stipulations of transporting hazardous materials overseas
One of the facts about industrial shipping that I’ve always found funny is, provided you have the funds, can put literally anything you want in a shipping container, have it picked up and shipped around the world, and dropped off in the exact same spot.
I have a feeling this is 80% automated with some human oversight, as taking a spreadsheet full of containers with all their specs and organizing them based on a preset algorithm is really not that complicated, provided you have enough compute power.
As someone in this industry, good job on making this sound interesting.
here before a ship captain makes a video bunking this and showing he just organized them and properly delivered them
this video might actually be pretty useful. About half of mym family works at the port of Antwerp. I think one of my uncle's job is even to plan out the layout of cargo ships
Hi at 1:44 You have the number sorted as Bay TIer and Row but at 2:35 the Row and Tier are switched. Now I don't know which one is correct. :(
For the Mistakes Video.
Point of order: We'd absolutely buy those shirts.
man i dont want to relive the days of being a vessel planner at all
0:52 Actually, those containers aren't rectangles. Rectangles are 2 dimensional shapes, but containers are 3 dimensional. The correct term is rectangular prism or cuboid.
Erm actually
You don’t get outside very often do you?
@@royce9018 Lol it’s just something that HAI jokes about in a yearly video about insignificant mistakes they made in videos of that year.
I feel like these are slowly getting more unhinged. Love it
You don't only need to care that in the final position the ship is upright and doesn't break apart. You also need to care about that while loading, because if you exceed a certain roll angle you won't be able to load more containers.
And one more thing - you can't twist the ship either. If you load heavy stuff in port bow and starboard aft you might end up with upright shift with good pitch but it will be getting twisted like a wringled towel.
Tetris is really about speed, not careful thought. As the great Jonas Neuebauer put it, "People always think I’m the one to call when they’re packing a suitcase or organizing a storage unit-and if you want that suitcase filled in 10 seconds or less, I am your man."
finally a new container ship video to fuel my hyperfixation
Welcome fellow autie
I wish you would someday return to the calm narration style of old videos. Highways in the sky is still my favourite.
Would you like to know more? There's a nice channel called Casual Navigation that touches on Container ships that... Lose containers into the ocean and 'why' they might fall off the ship in the 1st place. They have a few videos on the topic, all of them are around 6-8 minutes long XD
It takes enormous amount of effort from people working in this industry, that's off 🙌
A video about shipping container setup has no business being this funny 😂
Weseel was right there and you guys missed it. Think Nukulear Wessel. Like the Enterprise. Love the content, keep it up!
organizing a container ship involves a complex interplay of strategic planning, technological application, and strict adherence to safety standards. This intricate process is vital for the seamless movement of goods across the globe, underscoring the importance of precision and coordination in maritime logistics.
So how do they do it? Do the use computer to calculate which container should stay where?
A computer is probably not going to find the optimal solution, but it can find a good approximate solution in a reasonable amount of time which attempts to minimise the number of crane movements. It's an optimisation problem in the end.
6:30 missed opportunity to label 20ft containers "half as container" and 40ft ones "thick as container"
Puffin shaped like muffins traveling over the bright blue sea. (My mom still likes to recite that nursery rhyme on occasion.)
It used to take a week to load cargo, now it takes a day (even if its much larger boat than anything that existed before 1900).
Fun Fact: As of 19 November 2024 at 18:45 the MSC Irina is moored at the Port of Gioia Tauro in Italy.