To solve the attitude control problem for a class of flight systems with unknown parameters, bounded disturbances and dead zone, an L1 adaptive controller is designed. By designing adaptive control law and low-pass filter, the fast adaption and robustness of the control system is guaranteed. The stability conditions of the L1 adaptive control system are derived, considering the different responses of actuator to control instructions in dead zone. The simulation results show that the proposed method can make adaptive compensation for the dead zone of the systems, and achieve stable tracking of reference instructions. It has a good robustness for the uncertainty and bounded disturbances.