In this paper, the robust adaptive control and back-stepping method are considered for attitude control of aircraft systems. First, a non-linear aircraft model is introduced and converted to standard state space form. Then, an adaptive sliding mode controller is designed by using the back-stepping method. An adaptive law is designed to cooperate with sliding mode control (SMC) to compensate for the unknown and uncertain parts of the aircraft systems. This method does not need to know the physical parameters of the aircraft model accurately, but only uses the adaptive upper bound of the matrix model norm to ensure the robustness of the system under SMC. Next, the stability of the adaptive law and SMC is analyzed and proven theoretically. At last, the effectiveness of this method is illustrated by extensive comparative simulations. Furthermore, the disturbance term is introduced to test the anti-interference performance of the controller. The results acquired from simulation illustrate that SMC can achieve good control performance.