A visibility lidar for the civil aviation airports is designed and developed. The observation experiments are carried out for six months continuously, and the results are compared with the atmospheric transmittance meter, atmospheric forward scattering meter and artificial observation results which are used in airports currently. Results show that the developed DSL-V backward scattering visibility lidar can meet the technical requirements of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). When the visibility ranges from 0 to 600 m, the detection error is less than 11.3% (Absolute error of visibility is less than or equal to 26 m). When the visibility ranges from 600 m to 1500 m, the detection error is less than 8.2%. When the visibility ranges from 1500 m to 10000 m, the detection error is less than 14%.