The orderly and efficient landing of carrier-based aircrafts is a necessary prerequisite to ensure that the deck operation support plan is carried out as scheduled. In order to improve the landing efficiency of carrier-based aircrafts and reduce the burden of traditional manual landing scheduling, a landing scheduling algorithm for carrier-based aircrafts is studied. Firstly, the mathematical model of landing scheduling for a carrier-based aircraft is constructed with the weighted landing time sum as the optimization objective. Secondly, an improved artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed to solve the model. Based on the basic artificial bee colony algorithm, the crossover operation, the elite strategy and a series of adaptive local search strategies are introduced to enhance the global search performance of the algorithm and improve the convergence speed of the algorithm. Finally, the case study and algorithm comparison verify, the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling model, and show that the improved artificial bee colony algorithm has stronger optimization performance and better robustness, which can solve the large-scale carrier aircraft landing scheduling problem, having practical engineering application value.