Abstract: Fatigue testing of a typical model of an aluminum alloy aero-riveted structure was carried out. The deterministic crack growth analysis method and equivalent SSF method were used to make life assessments of the model and the assessment results were compared with the experiment results. The results showed that the two assessment methods both had good prediction accuracy. Initial structural fatigue must be accurately assessed experimentally when predicting structure life with the deterministic crack growth analysis method, because the structure life assessment results closely reflect the size of initial structural faults.