In this paper, we design and optimize the ship-to-airship capture scheme of laser communication system according to the motion characteristics of an airship platform. A composite scanning strategy, consisting of coarse scanning and fine scanning, is proposed to solve the problem of the long capture time under conditions of small beam divergence angle and far distance. The working principle of the composite scanning strategy and the influencing factors in the capture process are analyzed emphatically, meanwhile, the important parameters in the coarse-fine composite scanning capture process, such as overlap area, capture field, scanning speed and motion compensation are optimized in detail. The simulation results show that the acquisition time reaches 62.7 s when the divergence angle is 400 μrad. Finally, we also validate the results by performing the outdoors airship experiment.