A zero-load slider is composed of two outside rails which produce a lift force pushing up the slider from the disk surface and a wide reverse step region which produces a suction force attracting the slider to the disk surface. In this paper, the flying characteristics of zero-load sliders are obtained by using an optimization technique. In the pressure calculation module, the FIFD scheme is used to solve the modified Reynolds equation. The BFGS method and a line search algorithm is employed to predict the static flying attitude. To investigate the effect of the geometric- parameters of zero-load sliders on the flying characteristics, recess depth, front step width, rail width, and taper height are varied and the corresponding flying attitudes are obtained. Simulation results demonstrate that recess depth and rail width have significant influences on the flying characteristics.