SummaryEvaluation of flight qualities plays an important role in the design of a civil aircraft. An appropriate level of flight qualities will be the key to achieve the airworthiness certification. With the objective to provide an overall view of flight qualities evaluation for a civil aircraft, a model‐based approach is proposed. Some terms related to flight qualities are defined formally, and the model‐based flight qualities evaluation approach under different situations is formed and proposed. Two working conditions of actuators are considered in the evaluation of flight qualities. When no actuator fails, linearization is adopted to build a linear flight dynamics model for analyzing the main parameter of flight qualities. When some actuators fail, a new off‐line approach for handling qualities evaluation, which employs a controller that generates appropriate commands for healthy actuators, is proposed. The design of the controller is following the idea of classical predictive control technique, and a recurrent linear quadratic programming problem is formulated to find the maximum remaining maneuverability while not avoiding any constraints. Taking the rotational maneuver as a study example, a test‐bed for handling qualities evaluation is built. The numerical simulation results show the feasibility of proposed evaluation approach.