To support gas turbine operators, NLR is developing capabilities for life assessment of hot engine components. As a typical example the first rotor blades of the high pressure (HP) turbine of the FlOO- PW-220 military turbofan will be discussed. For these blades tools have been developed to derive the blade temperature history from flight data obtained from F-16 missions. The resulting relative life consumption estimate should support the Royal Netherlands Air Force in their engine maintenance activities. The present paper describes the prediction method for the blade temperature, based on reverse engineering. Input data are the flight data of the engine performance parameters and the geometry of the HP turbine blades and vanes including film cooling orifices. The engine performance parameters are converted in HP turbine entry and exit conditions by the NLR Gas Turbine Simulation Program (GSP) engine model. Next a Computational Fluid dynamics (CFD) tool is used to calculate the resulting flow field and heat transfer coefficients without film cooling. An engineering method is used to predict the internal cooling and the resulting film injection temperature. The film cooling efficiency is estimated and a finite element method (FEM) for heat conduction completes the analysis tool. The method is illustrated by results obtained for the engine design point. Paper presented at the RTO-AVT Symposium on Heat Transfer and Cooling in Propulsion and Power Systems, Loen, Norway, May 2001.