With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization in China, civil aviation plays an increasingly important role in the transportation industry. However, pollutants and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from civil aviation are becoming an increasingly concerning environmental problem. In order to mitigate the resulting environmental pollution, such as air quality deterioration, regional and global climate warming, and declining human health, more and more efforts have been devoted to reducing both pollutants and GHG emissions. Among these efforts, emissions inventories from civil aviation provide a basis for quantifying pollutants and GHG emissions, establishing evaluation standards of environmental impact, and formulating management policies for both air quality improvement and climate change mitigation. In this paper, we reviewed both compilation approaches and data collection methods for civil aviation emissions inventories, introduced several typical calculation methods for aviation emissions inventories, and analyzed specific cases of actual application based on typical methods of inventory compilation. We also described in detail the activity level and emission index calculation methods of several pollutants and greenhouse gases. Furthermore, based on the above research methods, four typical application cases were investigated, including a specific airport, the landing and takeoff (LTO) cycle of a nation, the entire period with the LTO cycle and the climb–cruise–descent (CCD) phase of a country, and global emissions inventories from civil aviation. The results suggest that, in addition to quantifying the emissions of both pollutants and GHG produced by civil aviation, the selection of inventory compilation methods is likely to be important for improving aviation emission inventory accuracy and for further reducing the environmental, economic, and health impacts resulting from aviation emissions. Moreover, this paper can also provide a reference and theoretical basis for the development of aviation emission inventory compilation methods in the future.