This paper describes several approaches aiming to significantly reduce the amount of time required to determine the worst case gust loads for aircraft. A number of Design of Experiments, surrogate modeling and optimization techniques are applied in order to determine meta-models encompassing the entire flight envelope and different fuel cases using only a few test points. All of the methodologies are compared on data from a simple, assumed modes, free-free aircraft model with 5 ”interesting quantities”, and are shown to determine accurate predictions of the worst gust case with far fewer gust response calculations than a conventional Monte-Carlo approach.