This paper shows a general development process for aircraft gas turbine combustors. As a first step for developing the preliminary combustor design program, several combustor sizing methodologies using reference area concepts are reviewed. There are three ways to determine the reference area; 1) combustion efficiency approach, 2) pressure loss approach, 3) velocity assumption approach. The current study shows the comparisons of the calculated results of combustor reference values from the pressure loss and velocity assumption approaches. Further works are required to add iterative steps in the program using more reasonable values of pressure loss and velocities, and to evaluate the sizing results using data for actual combustor performance and sizes.