With the rapid development of the scramjet, air-breathing hypersonic vehicles(AHVs) are receiving worldwide attentions, while the control system design is of the most importance. Firstly, the developments in modeling of AHVs are briefly reviewed to illustrate the complexity of the controller design. Secondly, we concentrate to display several types of design methods for AHVs, i.e., linearized model-based controller design, back-stepping controller design, T-S fuzzy controller design, adaptive control and sliding mode control. Finally, this paper summarizes several practical problems that should be taken into account at design level, for example, actuator nonlinearity, fault-tolerance control, multi-objective control, switching control, etc., which could also be regarded as some potential research directions in the control system design for AHVs.