The work aims to study the recycling characteristics of the air bag in the recycling process, which is of important significance for the acceleration of development progress and improvement of recycling quality of the unmanned aerial vehicle, regarding the fact that the parachute-air bag is currently the main recycling way of unmanned aerial vehicle, and the air bag can play a very good role in reducing the overload, limiting the rebound and protecting the equipment in the recycling process. The damping characteristics of air bag in the recycling process of unmanned aerial vehicle were studied in the finite element simulation method. With the single air bag as the study object, the effects of inflation pressure, vent area and deflation pressure of air bag on its damping characteristics were analyzed, and the air bag parameters were optimized. The optimized air bag was applied to some high subsonic unmanned aerial vehicle, and its damping characteristics were verified. Parameters of air bag, such as inflation pressure, vent area and deflation pressure (no matter whether they were large or small) would affect the damping characteristics. A group of reasonable air bag pa-rameters should be determined according to the specific circumstances of the object in kind in the practical application. After the optimization of air bag parameters, for some high subsonic unmanned aerial vehicle with the damping scheme of double air bags, the acceleration at its center of gravity was significantly reduced during the recycling, and its rebound velocity and residual velocity were also remarkably improved, which met the requirements with respect to the overloaded recycling of the airframe and airborne equipment. The analysis and optimization of air bag in the finite element method play a very important role in guiding the design of air bag.