This paper investigates the problem of fault-tolerant controller design for the nonlinear aircraft systems under external disturbances and faults. To deal with this problem, a novel fuzzy control approach is presented. First, the nonlinear aircraft system is modeled on the basis of the T-S fuzzy model. So as to increase the applicability and practicability of the model, the fuzzy systems with unmeasurable premise variables are considered. An adaptive fuzzy observer is constructed to provide the estimations of the states and the faults. The asynchronization of the premise variables between the fuzzy systems and the designed observer is coped with the equivalent matrix transformation and matrix optimization techniques. Then, a fault-tolerant control scheme is presented to achieve the purpose of effective control. Finally, the theoretical findings are verified by a simulation example.