Abstract: The general aviation has been upgraded to a national strategy, and becomes one of the strategic new industries with the good development prospects in China. In order to accurately grasp the domestic and international research hotspots and evolution trends of general aviation development, the paper collects the general aviation related literature based on the Web of Science core collection database and the domestic CNKI database, and draws the mapping about the time and space of distribution, the author of distribution, keyword co-occurrence and evolution trends by using the Citespace software. Knowledge mapping vividly shows the current hotspots and evolution process in this field:The research on general aviation at home and abroad continues to rise. The international research is mainly based on the developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, while China is in a catch-up situation. The domestic research hotspots show the characteristics of key and coordinated development. The evolving research hotspots display five stages:Flight activities and flight management of general aviation, low-altitude airspace management, aviation manufacturing and industrial chain, general aviation services, airport economy and general aviation industry. Low-altitude airspace management is the biggest bottleneck in the development of general aviation, which is also the key factor in the future development.