With the deadline to reach net-zero quickly approaching, the aviation industry will soon have to shift away from kerosene aircraft. One of the candidate zero-emissions technologies for future aircraft is hydrogen. However, due to the technology being yet immature, the implementation of hydrogen on aircraft is expected to be a long-term endeavour. To accelerate this process, a study has been conducted to evaluate the feasibility of hydrogen-kerosene hybrid combustion as a stepping stone towards full hydrogen implementation. Three goals have been defined: to estimate first-order performance of future hydrogen combustion aircraft, to bring understanding to the hydrogen combustion design space, and to identify a potential pathway for the implementation of hydrogen combustion. To achieve these, simulations have been run using a computational model of a hydrogen retrofit of a ATR 72-500 with engines capable of hybrid combustion. An optimization approach was used to explore this new design space without biases. To accurately reflect the importance of each optimization objective, Tabu Search with Multiple Dominance Relations was chosen as the optimizer. The results of this investigation have revealed fundamental trade-offs in the retrofit design space and provided a set of optimized aircraft of varying hybridisation fraction that can pave the pathway towards full hydrogen implementation in aircraft.