In order to realize the power line extraction of long distance linear airborne light detection and ranging(LiDAR), a power line extraction method of long-distance airborne LiDAR based on cloth simulation was proposed. On the basis of data preprocessing, the function between cloth and corresponding airborne LiDAR point cloud was analyzed by simulating the falling process of cloth. The position where cloth stayed after gravity falling was determined as the power line point cloud with similar height, and then the straight line was fitted in the xOy plane. The distances from points to the fitting line were used to judge the number of power lines whether odd or even. And the power line point clouds were divided by the judgment of points on both sides of the line to achieve the extraction of a single power line. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method is 98.9%, with high degree of automation and not sensitive to the lack of local point cloud, which has good engineering application value for intelligent powerline inspection and automatic analysis of transmission channel spatial structure.