In an aero gas-turbine engine, a surface air-oil heat exchanger (SAOHE) is used to cool the oil system for the gearboxes and electric generators. The SAOHE is installed inside the fan casing of the engine in order to dissipate the heat from the oil system into the bypass duct stream. The purpose of this study was to develop an effective numerical method for designing an SAOHE for an aero gas-turbine engine. A two-dimensional model using a porous medium was developed to evaluate the aero-thermal performance of the fins of the heat exchanger, and a one-dimensional flow and thermal network program was developed to save time and cost in the evaluation of the heat exchanger performance. Using this network program, the pressure drop and heat transfer performance of the heat exchanger were predicted, and the results were compared with two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics results and experiment data for validation.