Last updated: June 8, 2026
Fairway ETA is a maritime voyage planning platform built by marine engineers with broad operational experience across the maritime industry. The platform reflects how voyages are actually planned and executed — not how they look in a textbook.
Voyage planning has been stuck between two extremes for years.
On one side, enterprise platforms that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year and assume a dedicated routing department. On the other, free calculators that draw a great-circle line on a map, ignore canal transits, and treat the Strait of Hormuz as if it were just open water.
Most maritime professionals work somewhere in between — deck officers running pre-voyage estimates at 03:00, operations staff comparing routes in response to a charterer's enquiry, engineers checking whether a bunker plan still holds up after a Cape of Good Hope diversion. Something more honest than a great-circle line is needed, and waiting for IT to procure a six-figure license is rarely an option.
Fairway ETA is the platform that should have existed on every voyage and every service job in the careers that shaped it.
Fairway ETA generates and compares realistic voyage scenarios across the world's major shipping corridors — Suez, Panama, Cape of Good Hope, and the Northern Sea Route. For each candidate route, it estimates voyage distance, transit time, fuel consumption by grade (VLSFO, MGO, HSFO), canal transit costs, and EU ETS carbon exposure on covered legs.
The platform currently includes:
Routes on Fairway ETA are not theoretical shortest paths between two coordinates. They follow real maritime geography — coastlines, canal gates, traffic separation schemes, and the practical constraints that shape where ships actually go.
The engine combines two layers of data: an established global maritime routing network published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (MARNET), and high-resolution coastline data from the Natural Earth project. Where the public network is sparse — particularly in East Asian waters and along the Northern Sea Route — it is supplemented with route refinements derived from real vessel movement patterns to keep the output recognizable to a shipmaster.
The engine is deliberately scoped. It does not pretend to forecast weather, provide live commercial bunker prices, or predict charter party fixtures. The job is to give the planner a defensible, reproducible voyage estimate they can take to a meeting or a charterer without having to explain away the numbers.
The Insights section publishes industry analysis on routing decisions, fuel market dynamics, regulatory changes (MEPC, EU ETS, IMO frameworks), and chokepoint risk. Articles are written from a working-operator perspective and source numbers from public industry data — Ship & Bunker for fuel pricing, Baltic Exchange for freight indices, official IMO and EU regulatory documents, and primary news from established maritime publications.
Independence. Display advertising (including Google AdSense) and sponsored content may appear on the site to support its operation. Both are kept separate from editorial work — advertising does not influence editorial decisions, and sponsored content is clearly labeled as such.
Accuracy and corrections. Articles are clearly dated. When an article is materially revised — because the underlying data changed, an event turned out differently from what was first reported, or a factual error was identified — the piece is updated and the change noted. Corrections are treated as part of doing the work honestly, not as a reputational hazard to be avoided.
What this site does not do. Articles are not manufactured by paraphrasing press releases. Pages are not padded with keyword stacks dressed up as content. Nothing is published that cannot be defended on operational grounds. If there is nothing useful to say about a topic, nothing is written about it.
Fairway ETA is developed by Fairtech, an independent maritime technology team. The team brings together marine engineers with seagoing experience and backgrounds in shipbuilding and shipboard equipment engineering across multiple subsystems. Fairway ETA grew out of years of observing the same planning gaps repeated across very different parts of the industry.
Business inquiries, partnerships, and feedback can be sent to the email address below.
Questions, route calculation errors, and data partnership inquiries can be sent to hello@fairwayeta.com. For media inquiries, citation requests, and data usage guidance, see the Press & Data page.
Every message is read, and responses typically arrive within 1–2 business days.
For shorter updates and live commentary on shipping events: @fairwayeta on X.
Ready to plan your next voyage? Launch the Calculator.