The developing history of meteorological observation on commercial aircrafts is reviewed and its characteristics and applications to weather operation and atmospheric researches are described. The acquisition approaches, advantages and limitations of the observation data from commercial aircrafts are analyzed and its future trend is given. It is pointed out that meteorological observation on commercial aircrafts, as an important observation platform, has broad prospects in application and has attracted great attention of meteorological service and civil aviation industry. The data from the commercial aircraft observation will further improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and promote the weather service level, especially improving the performance of NWP models, and it will certainly play a more and more important role in meteorological researches and operational weather forecasting.