One of the priority tasks of the modern aviation industry is to increase the economic efficiency of aircrafts. In the context of solving this problem, when creating new aircrafts, polymer composite materials (PCM) are increasingly used. Particular attention is paid to structural elements, damage to which can lead to a decrease in the strength of an airframe as a whole. Therefore, an essential task in the design, maintenance, and operation of the test is to study the effect of interlayer defects on the strength and behavior of PCM structures under the influence of unsteady loads. This work is devoted to a numerical analysis of the behavior of a plate made of a polymer composite material (PCM) under unsteady load considering interlayer defects of an elliptical shape, as well as an assessment of the strength of a composite package according to various fracture criteria. The problem is solved by the finite element method using the LS-DYNA software package. Then, using the method of mathematical modeling, the interlayer separation of an elliptical shape was analyzed, which allowed to evaluate the strength of the plate and fiber according to the criteria of Hashin, Puck, Chang-Chang, and LaRC03 and compare the results. It was found in the study, that the failure indices and safety factors, which were obtained using various criteria (Hashin and Chang-Chang), have the same distribution, since the dependence of the implemented fracture mode (fiber compression in the longitudinal direction) is identical. Analysis.