In this study， the performance of a three-hop hybrid radio frequency/free space optical/radio frequency （RF/FSO/RF） airborne communication link based on decode-and-forward （DF） relaying is investigated. The connection link between the airborne subnode and the backbone node is the RF link， whereas that between the airborne backbone node and the backbone node is the FSO link. The same modulation method is assumed in the three hops. The RF channel is characterized using the Nakagami-m fading model， and the FSO channel follows the Exponentiated Weibull atmospheric turbulence distribution model. Further， closed expressions are obtained for the end-to-end outage probability （OP） and the average bit error rate （BER）. Subsequently， the effects of turbulence intensities， RF channel fading coefficients， and modulation modes on the OP and average BER are analyzed. The obtained results indicate that in the three-hop DF relaying mode， the optimal OP and BER are dependent on the hop with the worst channel quality. Furthermore， binary phase shift keying （BPSK） modulation outperforms binary frequency shift keying （BFSK） modulation and high-order PSK with respect to the BER. The deduced closed expression is conducive for quantitatively analyzing the link performance and provides a reference for system design.