China's civil aviation industry has experienced four stages: strict regulation (1949-1979), deregulation and introduction of competition (1980-1994), regulation (1995-2001), and further deregulation (2002 to present). This paper, focusing on China's civil aviation regulatory reform from 1995 to 2015, constructed the evaluation index system of the comprehensive competitiveness of China's civil aviation industry. The sequential data from 1995 to 2015 were used to calculate the comprehensive competitiveness with the entropy method. The result shows that China's civil aviation industry comprehensive competitive- ness was gradually improved. The civil aviation industry regulation reform was quantified as an explanatory variable and the semi-logarithmic regression model was used to examine the influence of civil aviation industry regulation on the comprehensive competitiveness of civil aviation industry. It is concluded that the reform of civil aviation industry was one of the factors that improved the comprehensive competitiveness of civil aviation industry, but it was not the major one, and that the effect of regulatory reform was not fully displayed, so regulatory reform should be the future direction of China's civil aviation industry development.