To fulfill the high reliability of the aeronautical application, a novel three-phase four-wire shunt active power filter (APF) is proposed in this study. In this proposed configuration, traditional phase-leg which is composed of two power switches is replaced by the novel leg composed of one power switch and one diode. The annoying 'shoot-through' phenomenon is eliminated by using this novel configuration. Meanwhile, better efficiency and better performance brought by this novel configuration benefit the improvement of the compensation performance. Moreover, operation principle of the APF is analysed in detail; current control strategy and the voltage balance control strategy for the split-capacitor topology are studied as well. Finally, a prototype with the compensating capacity of 3 kVA is designed. Simulation and experimental results are shown to confirm the validity and feasibility of the novel aeronautical APF.