Gears, as key components of aircraft transmission systems, play a crucial role in determining the safety and reliability of the entire system. Long service life, low failure probability, and numerous failure modes are characteristics of gears. Accelerated life testing methods for ground verification can enhance testing efficiency and reduce experimental costs. These methods have wide-ranging applications in gear mechanical performance testing, failure mechanism research, surface strengthening process comparisons, and structural parameter optimisation design validation. This paper provides a systematic discussion of four aspects: the primary failure modes of gears, advancements in testing methods, test design, and statistical data analysis, and it presents several related classic engineering cases. Based on this, the challenges faced by accelerated life testing and the future directions for its development are summarised and anticipated. The work presented in this paper can provide technical references for test plan design and experimental data processing for gear accelerated life testing personnel.