In order to improve the waveform decomposition precision of echoes for the airborne lidar, the waveform decomposition of echo signals for the airborne lidar is realized and also experimentally verified by taking the skewed normal distribution functions as fitting basis functions and by means of the layer stripping strategy as well as the combination of the seeker optimization algorithm and the LM algorithm with global convergence. The results show that the echo signal can be decomposed into the superposition of a series of skewed normal distribution functions and the key parameters such as signal amplitude, central position, half width and skewness coefficient can be obtained. The correlation coefficients of the fitted waveform and the echo signal are both larger than 99%, indicating an effective improvement of waveform decomposition precision. The proposed method can be used to realize the accurate decomposition of echo signals for the full-waveform airborne lidar.