With the advantages of low cost and high bandwidth, the airborne short-range data communication system is becoming more and more important for the digital communication between digital aircraft and ground systems.Based on avionics system engineering method, the requirements on function, performance and interfaces of the airborne short-range data communication system were defined.The logical architecture was designed through function flow block diagram method;and the physical architecture was designed by using integrated and modular method.A system prototype was developed based on ARINC600 standard, and a system verification environment was set up including airborne and ground system simulations.The verification result shows that the system design can meet the requirements, and the research result supplies a reference for the avionics system designers.