To the attitude control problem of the quad-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with actuator malfunction and external perturbations, a Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) controller was designed based on the model reference adaptive control.By analyzing the dynamic characteristics of the quad-rotor UAV, the actuator failures were added to the system model, and a dynamic model with failed actuator was obtained. The adaptive law of the designed controller was driven by the error signal of the reference model and the model with actuator failure, which can achieve better attitude control. The asymptotical stability of the proposed controller was proved by using Lyapunov method.The result of simulation with Matlab showed that, the proposed controller can track the reference attitude angle in the cases of external perturbations and actuator failures, and the method is feasible and effective.