In 2025, Fintraffic’s VTS Centres prevented eight merchant shipping vessels from potentially running aground and stopped near-misses from turning into accidents. The year was marked by GNSS disruptions on satellite positioning systems, which caused trouble for vessels traversing the Gulf of Finland.
Fintraffic’s Vessel Traffic Services are tasked with ensuring the safety and smooth flow of shipping along the Finnish coast and in the international sea areas in its vicinity. In 2025, the company prevented eight potential cases of vessels running aground, one of which took place in the archipelago, five in the outer archipelago and two at open sea.
The rising security tensions in Europe have been observable in the Gulf of Finland as well, where numerous GNSS disruptions have required even greater vigilance from Fintraffic’s VTS Centres as well.
“In 2025, vessel traffic remained mainly safe, even though GNSS disruptions made merchant shipping and vessel navigation more difficult and increased the risk of accidents. At our VTS Centres, we supervised the safe passage of vessel traffic, such as tankers, cargo vessels and passenger ships, throughout the year. All in all, we intervened in vessel movement proactively some 18,000 times during the year to ensure that everything was running smoothly and safely”, sums up Sari Talja, Operations Director of Fintraffic VTS.
Of the groundings that were prevented by Fintraffic’s VTS Centres in 2025, all cases involved a situation where a vessel was heading for shallows but changed course once the VTS Centre contacted them. There were also eight instances where a VTS Centre assisted in navigation to ensure the safe passage of vessels in fairways and to prevent near-misses between vessels and other hazardous situations.
The safety of vessel traffic was developed during the year by the VTS Centres introducing a new situational picture service for monitoring disturbances in satellite positioning. The service supports the authorities’ situational picture, and in the future, the goal is to make the service available for seafarers as well. During the year, vessel traffic safety was also enhanced by surveying the additional needs of special transport safety zones on the Finnish coast. These safety zones are used to ensure the safe passage of special transports such as LNG and LPG tankers on fairways where traffic is busy or conditions require particular caution.
Functional and efficient maritime logistics are key to the success of Finland’s foreign trade and maintaining competitiveness, as over 90 per cent of our exports and imports are transported by sea. Fintraffic’s VTS Centres monitor the passage of merchant shipping through Finland’s coastal waters 24/7, every day of the year.
Thanks to their thorough knowledge of the Baltic Sea, Fintraffic’s Vessel Traffic Services are able to support navigating the shallow and rocky sea as smoothly as possible, while ensuring that maritime traffic is also safe during the highly demanding winter season. In addition, we are developing new service models for data and snapshot services where close cooperation between maritime actors and new digital solutions promotes the exchange of data and building a snapshot of maritime traffic and its logistics chains.
