Aviation kerosene has been widely used in aviation and aerospace fields as both propellant and coolant for aircraft fuel systems and thermal management systems, where the supercritical heat transfer calculations are required. As a typical aviation fuel in China, RP-3 has gained much research interest on its heat transfer characteristics under supercritical pressure, resulting in many empirical correlations. However, the prediction accuracy of the existing correlations is not satisfactory and the pursuit of accuracy improvement remains needed. This paper proposes a new correlation based on the database of RP-3 heat transfer in vertical tubes under supercritical pressure, which contains 1722 experimental data points compiled from six published papers. It has a mean absolute deviation (MAD) of 11.0%, predicting 83.7% of the entire database within +/- 20%, while the best existing model available in the literature only has an MAD of 24.1%, predicting 58.4% of the entire database within +/- 20%. Therefore, the new model improves the prediction accuracy of RP-3 heat transfer under supercritical pressure remarkably. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.