This paper presents a general solution based on improved ant colony algorithm for aircraft terrain following route planning. The three-dimensional map is reconstructed into solution space by the idea of spatial equipartition， and a series of improvement measures are adopted to enhance the efficiency of the ant colony algorithm， including： designing the pheromone updating strategy to strengthen the positive gain of the optimal ants in the colony and weaken the negative gain of the worst ants； designing the node movement strategy by comprehensively considering the effects of the feasible waypoint distance， altitude， and turning angle； adopting the particle swarm algorithm to intelligently and optimally solve the core parameters of the ant colony algorithm to achieve the rapid generation of terrain following routes. Finally， the advancedness and feasibility of the method are verified by specific examples.