Airbreathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs) feature a severe force and thermal loads flight environment, which leads to a high risk of elevator failures such as embrittlement, thermal damage, chipping, furthermore to affect the attitude control accuracy degradation and even destabilization. Accordingly, this paper proposes a faulttolerant control strategy via the active-passive composite approach, which employs a sliding mode control (SMC) to guarantee the robustness of the system when aerodynamic parameters change abruptly at the initial stage of an elevator failure. Simultaneously, sensor data and the online aerodynamic identification approach are utilized to calculate aerodynamic force damages. After meeting the transient stabilization requirements, it will switch to the adaptive integrated-flight-propulsion control, thereby performing control reconfiguration and enhancing the flight control quality after the failure occurs. Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness and robustness of the strategy and also show a robustness and better control effect compared with a single fault-tolerant control strategy.