Purpose: This study investigated different band selection methods to classify spectrally similar data -obtained from aerial images of healthy citrus canopies and citrus greening disease (Huanglongbing or HLB) infected canopies -using small differences without unmixing endmember components and therefore without the need for an endmember library. However, large number of hyperspectral bands has high redundancy which had to be reduced through band selection. The objective, therefore, was to first select the best set of bands and then detect citrus Huanglongbing infected canopies using these bands in aerial hyperspectral images. Methods: The forward feature selection algorithm (FFSA) was chosen for band selection. The selected bands were used for identifying HLB infected pixels using various classifiers such as K nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), naïve Bayesian classifier (NBC), and generalized local discriminant bases (LDB). All bands were also utilized to compare results. Results: It was determined that a few well-chosen bands yielded much better results than when all bands were chosen, and brought the classification results on par with standard hyperspectral classification techniques such as spectral angle mapper (SAM) and mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF). Median detection accuracies ranged from 66-80%, which showed great potential toward rapid detection of the disease. Conclusions: Among the methods investigated, a support vector machine classifier combined with the forward feature selection algorithm yielded the best results.