In recent years, there has been a strong demand of developing advanced structural materials with functional properties such as high specific strength, high elevated temperature specific strength, high fatigue specific strength, low corrosion loss and low wear loss. This is because the practical uses of these functional structure materials are expected to cause the saving of material amount, reductions of material cost and energy during material production as well as the saving of consuming energy during practical uses. Besides, the light-weight materials with high corrosion resistance and high wear resistance are effective for the increase of endurance limit and the lightening of final products. Thus, the development of novel Al-based alloys having simultaneously the above-described functional properties is particularly important nowadays.As strengthening mechanisms for Al-based alloys, the following seven mechanisms are generally known 1 : solid solution, grain size refinement, work hardening, age hardening, precipitation, dispersion and defect-induced solute segregation. We have also noticed that the use of rapid quenching enables highly supercooled liquid solidification in conjunction with a high nucleation rate and low growth rate. By utilizing the high nucleation rate and low growth rate phenomenon, we have synthesized various kinds of metastable phases which change from nanocrystalline base structure to bulk glassy base structure through an amorphous base structure with increasing quenching effect (cooling rate). It is also known that the quenching effect is dominated by cooling rate from melt resulting from rapid solidification processes as well as by supercooling capacity of alloy liquid depending on alloy component and composition.When we focus on the strengthening caused by metastable phases, the effect is due to the combination of solid solution + ultra-high density of defects for amorphous phase and dispersion + grain size refinement + segregation for nanocrystalline phase. The amorphous plus nanocrystalline mixed phase alloys are expected to have simultaneously almost all the strengthening mechanisms. By utilizing the combined strengthening mechanisms of these metastable phases, we have tried to prepare novel Al-based alloys with the high tensile strength exceeding 1500 MPa at room temperature, high elevated temperature strength above 500 MPa at 573 K, high rotating beam fatigue strength above 400 MPa at 10 7 cycles, high elevated temperature fatigue strength above 100 MPa at 673 K after 10 6 cycles and high corrosion resistance below 20 mm/year in 0.25 M NaOH aqueous solution at 293 K. In addition, these Al-based alloys have been requested to exhibit a low wear loss, low coefficient of thermal expansion and low material density etc. This paper presents the review of the development achievements of metastable Al-based alloys obtained in our group on the basis of the above-described backgrounds and objectives. This paper reviews the features of alloy components, structure and mechanical properties, p...