The structural health monitoring method has the advantages of quick response to small-scale damage, achieving large-scale monitoring, which can monitor the health status of important aircraft structures in real time online, so as to ensure the safe flight of aircraft and reduce maintenance costs. A structural health monitoring method based active elastic wave for metal structures of civil aircraft was studied. This paper first proposes a simulation method of metal structure elastic wave fluctuation characteristic, and describes the key steps of simulation parameter setting in detail. Then, through collecting experimental signal data, the signal waveform and the wave propagation group velocity were compared. The results show that the maximum error between the simulation signal data and the experimental signal data is about 5%, which verifies the validity and correctness of the proposed simulation method. The simulation method can be used to study the fluctuation characteristics and damage effects of the metal structure of aircraft.