Using the unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) to perform the visual inspection of the aircraft surface instead of the maintenance staffs is a research hotspot in the field of aircraft maintenance. According to the shape characteristics of the aircraft, it's divided into several parts. Based on the parameters of the camera carried on a UAV, the position of the UAV can be set. The cubic spline interpolation was adopted to interpolate the UAV positions and an offset along normal vectors of the aircraft surface was set to generate viewpoints. Extracting viewpoints with the same height, different intelligent algorithms were employed to achieve the path planning of the aircraft surface inspection in the horizontal dimensional. Compared different intelligent algorithms, the simulated annealing algorithm(SA) has the better performance compared to tabu search(TS), genetic algorithm(GA), and sparrow search algorithm(SSA). This method will provide the coverage inspection of the aircraft surface by connecting different altitudes properly.