A detailed analysis is made to the development of airborne safety-critical system onboard the third and the fourth generation civil aircrafts at home and abroad. The technical characteristics of such typical fault-tolerant technology as the multi-channel voting etc. are summarized.Aiming at the challenges of the new-generation aircrafts on the reliability, fault-tolerant capability, fault-detection/fault-isolation capability, and real-time performance of the airborne safety-critical computer systems, a design idea of a high-integrity computer system based on hierarchical fault-tolerant technology is proposed.The design principle of the hierarchical high-integrity fault-tolerant system is described, and the critical technologies of Lock-step and time-trigger network are given. The strategy can satisfy the development requirements of the next-generation aircrafts, and can improve the safety and reliability of the airborne safety-critical computer systems.