Flight data are series of parameters related to flight and operation status. The flight data anomaly detection technique is aimed at monitoring the health status of key components of the aircraft and discovering the crew flight control problems, which benefits to the daily maintenance, eliminating potential safety hazard and ensuring aviation safety. However, the lack of labeled data, high accuracy requirement, computing resource constraint and other issues also pose serious challenges to practical use. This paper describes the basic connotation and research status of flight data anomaly detection, and on this basis, discusses the potential problems and possible development directions, and strives hard to provide feasible research ideas for the development of flight data anomaly detection.