Airborne infrared remote sensing technology has irreplaceable advantages, such as full-time work, flexibility and high spatial resolution, etc. It plays a key role in remote sensing science, land monitoring, national defense applications, etc. Development of airborne infrared remote sensing is vital to our country's national defense and economic development. In recent years, airborne infrared remote sensing technology has developed rapidly, with crucial breakthroughs in high spectral resolution infrared imaging and high spatial resolution infrared imaging. To get higher spatial resolution, spectral resolution, temporal resolution and radiometric resolution are missions of infrared technology research group. While introducing the latest international developments, the paper presents significant technological breakthroughs made by the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics airborne remote sensing team in full-spectrum hyperspectral imaging and area-array scanning imaging. New generation instruments have been successfully applied to land classification, thermal drainage monitoring of nuclear power plants and other application fields. The latest results are given.