With the accelerated transformation of aerospace equipment toward lightweight and intelligent design, the traditional passive maintenance model based on periodic inspections can no longer meet the urgent demands for high reliability and real-time safety assessment. During long-term service, key aircraft structures such as the fuselage and wings are subjected to complex coupled effects, including multiaxial cyclic loads, fatigue accumulation, environmental corrosion, and dynamic impact. These factors can induce the progressive expansion of hidden damage, highlighting the urgent need for online load monitoring technologies to enable accurate characterization and spatial localization of damage evolution mechanisms. FBG sensing technology, with its core advantages of strong electromagnetic immunity, high sensitivity, and long-term stability, has emerged as a promising alternative to overcome the limitations of traditional electrical sensors. It is steadily progressing from laboratory research toward practical engineering applications. However, the deployment of FBG-based systems still faces several technical challenges, such as cross-sensitivity, miniaturization of demodulation units, and precision integration, which hinder their widespread adoption in aircraft structural load monitoring. This study focuses on the research and application of FBG technology in aircraft structural load monitoring. It systematically reviews the background and current development of load monitoring requirements, summarizes representative research progress and typical application cases both domestically and internationally, and discusses key technical issues and future development trends of FBG-based structural load monitoring in aviation.