The emergency evacuation of passengers and crew on a civil aircraft is a man-machine-environment multi-system coupling process, which involves complex factors such as human behavior, cabin environment, disaster situation, etc. Cabin layout, personnel attributes, emergency measures all have a significant influence on the process and results of emergency evacuation. As emergency evacuation is directly related to the safety of civil aircraft, the airworthiness standard of transport aircraft requires that civil aircraft with more than 44 seats must perform a full-scale emergency evacuation test for airworthiness demonstration, demanding the evacuation process to be completed within 90 seconds under specified environmental conditions. This paper outlines the airworthiness requirements of civil aircraft for emergency evacuation, summarizes the experimental research methods and numerical simulation methods of emergency evacuation, and prospects the research trend about emergency evacuation combined with the future requirements of civil aircraft safety design and the development of related technologies.