In the core competence comprehensive evaluation of aviation manufacturing enterprises, exploring the key factors affecting core competence is crucial to improve the competitiveness of the aviation manufacturing enterprises. In this paper, a novel hybrid approach integrating genetic algorithm (GA) and support vector machines (SVM) is proposed to conduct the key factor exploration tasks in the core competitiveness evaluation of aviation manufacturing enterprises. In the proposed hybrid GA-SVM approach, the GA is used for key factor exploration, while SVM is used to calculate the fitness function of the GA method. Using the survey data from Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), some experiments analysis is conducted to test the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid approach. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid GA-SVM approach can be used as an alternative solution to key factor exploration.