The motion of an aircraft landing gear over a rough runway can be modeled by a nonclassically damped system subject to nonstationary random excitations. In this paper, the approximate analysis methods based on either the real or complex normal modes for the computation of nonstationary response covariances are proposed. It has been found by simulation involving a realistic example that, for the nonclassically damped random vibrational systems, the approximate solution method based on the complex normal mode is superior to other approaches with respect to the accuracy and computation time.