Aiming at the safety control requirement of the receiver aircraft during the docking stage of the Aerial Autonomous Refueling (AAR), an adaptive controller is proposed to ensure the attitude safety control of the receiver under multiple disturbance sources, including the effects of tanker wake vortex, atmospheric turbulence, and actuator efficiency degradation. The multi-stage series “rod-ball” model is employed for the modeling of the hose-drogue system. The external forces are investigated and the impact of airflow disturbance on the motion of the hose-drogue system is considered. To counteract the influence of these disturbances, an adaptive fault-tolerant sliding mode controller for attitude control of the receiver, with stability guaranteed by the Lyapunov analysis, is designed for the purpose of attitude safety control. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed receiver attitude safety controller achieves good performance against various disturbances for the AAR docking control.