Airborne antenna installed on the surface of UAV is easy to become a lightning attachment point. Lightning will pose a serious threat to the flight safety of the UAV. The purpose is to carry out the relevant design and verify the effectiveness of the design. A UHF airborne antenna is against to the research object. The segmented lighting diverter strips and RF port lightning suppressor were designed for protection. The initial leader attachment test, the induced transients in external mounted hardware test, the electrical performance test and the system evaluation calculation were successively carried out on the antenna to study the effect response of the antenna in different lightning environments. The test results show that damage is reduced. In addition, the influence of the installation of the segmented lighting diverter strips on the electrical performance of the antenna was 0. 3 dB at most, and the RF lightning suppressor will hardly affect the SWR and gain. Finally, the link margin meets the requirement of more than 3 dB. The effectiveness of the design was proved.