Pierre Guillaumat
Compagnie Nationale de Navigation · Tanker · Scrapped 1983 · built by Chantiers de l'Atlantique
Pierre Guillaumat holds the absolute deadweight record — 555,051 tonnes — and the saddest career on this site: too big for almost every port on Earth, scrapped after six years.
Derived metrics
Computed by ships.fyi from the core specification — see how we calculate these.
How big is it, really?
The Pierre Guillaumat's length overall, against things you already know the size of.
The 747-8 bar is the longest airliner ever built — our sibling site aircraft.fyi measures everything that flies the same way.
One Pierre Guillaumat = 1.54 Titanics · 3.9 football pitches · 17 blue whales · 5.4 Boeing 747-8s laid end to end.
The numbers
| Length overall | 414.22 m |
|---|---|
| Beam | 63.01 m |
| Deadweight | 555,051 t — largest ever |
| Draft (fully laden) | ≈28.6 m |
| Delivered | 1977 |
| Fate | Scrapped in South Korea, 1983 — six years old |
Put the Pierre Guillaumat next to something
Last verified: 2026-07-15 · Spot an error? business@luck.fyi
What makes it different
By pure deadweight — the mass of cargo, fuel and stores a ship can lift — Pierre Guillaumat is the largest ship ever built: 555,051 tonnes, a record nothing since has approached. It made her almost unusable.
Fully laden she drew nearly 29 metres. That closed the Suez and Panama canals, the English Channel, and all but a literal handful of the world's ports; much of her short career was spent lightering — pumping her cargo into smaller tankers offshore because no berth on the delivery coast could take her. She was a logistics theory that reality declined to accommodate.
Delivered in 1977 into the post-oil-shock rate collapse, she was scrapped in South Korea in 1983 at six years old — likely the shortest life of any record-holding ship in history. Her record is safe precisely because her career proved no one should try to beat it.
The Pierre Guillaumat line
Batillus class
Who operates the Pierre Guillaumat
No current operator — this ship's sailing days are over. The operators of record are below.