The performance of guidance system is the key factor of automatic carrier landing system. The positioning principles, measurement errors and effects on automatic carrier landing of airborne visual guidance architecture are investigated. The coplanar P4P relative positioning issue by means of cooperative landing aids is studied firstly, and by analyzing measurement error factors, types, probability distributions of the imaging devices, the three-axis positioning results affected by the errors are obtained using calculated coordinate transformation and the guidance error systems are modeled. Considering F/A-18A carrier-based aircraft automatic landing, the simulated positioning measurement accuracy of airborne visual guidance from gliding to touchdown are estimated. Further, the disturbances of automatic carrier landing system delay, airborne sensor noises, air-wake and deck motion are introduced, multi-factor coupled simulation system is modeled and touchdown position standard errors are calculated based on Monte-Carlo simulations influenced by the disturbances. The positioning accuracy and automatic landing performance of the proposed airborne visual guidance architecture achieves the performance of traditional guidance architectures. The deck motion and air-wake play important roles in automatic carrier landing performance.