The autoignition dynamics of a three component surrogate jet fuel (66.2% n-dodecane, 15.8% n-proplylbenzene, 18.0% 1,3,5,trimethylcyclohexane) suitable for usage as Jet A-1 and RP-3 aviation fuels are analyzed, using the detailed mechanism of Liu et al. (Liu et al. 2019). The conditions considered are relevant to the operation of gas turbines and the analysis is performed using mathematical tools of the computational singular perturbation (CSP) method. The key chemical pathways and species are identified in the analysis of a homogeneous adiabatic and constant pressure ignition system for a wide range of initial conditions. In particular, the key role of hydrogen and CO-related chemistry is highlighted, with an increasing importance as the initial temperature increases. The C 2 H 4 →C 2 H 3 →CH 2 CHO pathway is also identified to play a secondary but non-negligible role with an importance increasing with initial temperature, favoring the system's explosive dynamics and, thus, promoting ignition. Finally, C 2 H 4 is identified to be a species with a key (secondary) role to the system's explosive dynamics but its role is replaced by C 3 H 6 and eventually by O 2 , as the initial temperature increases. In the second part of the current work, a 58-species skeletal mechanism is generated using a previously developed algorithmic process based on CSP. The developed skeletal was tested in a wide range of initial conditions, including both ignition delay time 1Sharmin, August 5, 2020 and laminar flame speed calculations. For the conditions that were of interest in the current work, the skeletal approximated the detailed mechanism with very small error. The 58-species skeletal is shown to be ideal for use in CFD applications not only because of its small size but also because of its sufficiently slow associated fast timescale.