Individual aircraft life monitoring is of important significance for tapping the potential of each aircraft's life, to ensure safe use of the aircraft structure and extend aircraft service period. At present, individual aircraft life monitoring can be divided into four categories according to the technology way: regular inspection and maintenance; monitoring based on flight parameter; combination of the monitoring based on strain of dangerous parts and the monitoring based on flight parameter; monitoring based on smart materials and structures. This paper first reviews the aircraft life monitoring of development, technology advantages and disadvantages of each stage were compared, showed the way with the progress of the monitoring hardware technology is constantly progress, increasing accuracy, and then summed up in monitoring technology and its advantages and disadvantages of the four stand-alone way life used to monitor the development process, through the analysis of several technical methods that aircraft health monitoring system that rely on the monitoring of smart materials will be the future direction of development of the single life monitoring.