The compaction quality of filling is very crucial to high-fill airport construction. In recent years the vibration compaction and impacting compaction are two common compaction methods for treating the stone filling of high-fill airport, and they have different working capability. For treating the stone filling of high-fill airport in southwest mountainous areas, the methods of vibration compaction and impacting compaction are adopted to perform compaction test, furthermore, the economic effect and the compaction results of settlement observation、compacting degree test are compared and analyzed synthetically in order to determine an appropriate treating method and working parameters. The experiment results indicate that the economic unit price of the impacting compaction is a bit higher than that of the vibration compaction, but the treating effect of it is better than that of the vibration compaction for this project: the valid effect depth of the vibration compaction is 60cm, and the biggest compaction degree is only 90.3%; the valid effect depth of the impacting compaction is 120cm, and the compaction degree of 93% can be obtained when treating 20 to 30 times, what's more, the treating speed is faster. Thus, the impacting compaction method is taken in use and the reasonable working parameters are defined, which bring both a good compaction effect and an obvious economic benefit in the project practice.