While air transport provides travelers with efficient and convenient flight services, the air pollution caused by carbon emissions from air transport has become a problem for worldwide attention, which also brings great pressure on China's civil aviation transport industry to reduce emissions. Effectively identifying the driving factors of carbon emission and analyzing the influence degree of each factor are the key to realizing emission reduction. Based on the calculation of the carbon emissions of China's air transport from 2000 to 2017 and the analysis of its evolution characteristics, the paper conducts an empirical analysis of the driving factors affecting the carbon emission of China's air transport through the deformation of Kaya identity and the use of logarithmic average index decomposition (LMDI). The result shows that the scale of economic development, industrial scale and population play a positive role in driving carbon emissions, while energy intensity and transport intensity play a negative role in restraining carbon emissions.