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While aircraft environmental performance has been important since the beginnings of commercial aviation, continuously increasing passenger traffic and a rise in public awareness have made aircraft noise and emissions two of the most pressing issues hampering commercial aviation growth today. The air transportation for the new millennium will require revolutionary solutions to meeting public demand for improving safety, reliability, environmental compatibility, and affordability. The objective of this research is to assess the trade-off between operating costs and environmental requirements of the future aero engines for short range commercial aircrafts. This involves optimising the engines’ design point to minimise the block fuel and evaluating the economic and environmental impact. A high by-pass ratio turbofan engine with performance characteristics and technology from the year 2000 was set up as a baseline and compared to very high by-pass ratio turbofans. The results present a great potential benefit of the geared turbofan compared to high BPR one (baseline) to reduce cruise CO2 emissions and noise; however this may involve NOx penalties, that is an increase of 5.1% in comparison to the baseline. The CRTF engine seems to be, at least according to the simulations, a very promising solution in terms of environmental and economical performance. This is one on the series of work that would be carried out on the cycles being assessed in this paper (feasibility study). Further work on the specific technical issues — such as: technological implications — would be published when completed.