Abstract Nowadays all efforts in planing hull research are focused on resistance reduction for achieving the highest speed in fast planing crafts. Furthermore, many fruitful research projects have been carried out on marine coatings, planing equipment, and optimization of propeller and hull form, which revolutionized industry of high - speed crafts and made them an efficient survival vehicle in coastal areas and rivers. In this paper the hydrodynamic performance of planing hulls are investigated by means of a modified Savitsky model for both non-stepped and stepped bodies. Meanwhile, in order to meet this goal reasonably, effective geometrical parameters of planing hull are investigated and then operational hydrodynamic characteristics of the craft are predicted by using a computational program. Finally, the calculation results are verified by means of a CFD-analysis model.