Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is an essential operation in improving the reliability of UAVs.Aiming at the contradiction between data quantity and transmission efficiency in airborne PHM communication of BeiDou short message, a kind of BDS priority-based packet transmission strategy for airborne PHM communication is developed.Based on the idea of transmission information priority, a packet transmission strategy is designed to balance the contradiction between communication frequency and insufficient capacity.Then, the reliability of communication is improved by using the automatic repeat-request mechanism, and the visual communication application is realized.The experimental results show that the proposed strategy can reliably transmit PHM information within the specified time, which verifies the reliability of the developed BDS priority-based packet transmission strategy in terms of airborne PHM information transmission.