This paper proposes a novel prescribed performance fault tolerant control for hypersonic flight vehicle nonaffine models with actuator failures. First, the hypersonic flight vehicle longitudinal model is decomposed into two subsystems: the altitude subsystem and the velocity subsystem, which are expressed in non-affine forms to design the controller. Second, a novel performance function is used to design the backstepping controller, considering the actuator failures of the altitude subsystem. Different from previous studies, the backstepping controller designed in this paper reduces the steps and computational load. For the velocity subsystem, a prescribed performance fault-tolerant control law is also designed for the nonaffine velocity subsystem with actuator failures. The novel performance function not only guarantees the transient performance and steady-state accuracy of the system but also greatly reduces the overshoot of tracking error. Finally, the Lyapunov functional is used to prove the stability of the designed control system, and the effectiveness and superiority of the method are verified by simulation. INDEX TERMS Hypersonic flight vehicles, prescribed performance, actuator failures, nonaffine model, backstepping control.