In this research, damage behavior of singly oriented ply (SOP) fiber metal laminate (FML) subjected to concentrated load was studied. The static indentation tests were conducted to study fiber orientation effect on damage behavior of FML. During the static indentation tests, acoustic emission technique (AE) was adopted to study damage characteristics of FML. AE signals were obtained by using AE sensor with 150kHz resonance frequency and the signals were compared with indentation curves of FML. The damage process of SOP FML was divided by three parts, i.e., crack initiation, crack propagation, and penetration. The AE characteristics during crack initiation show that the micro crack is initiated at lower ply of the plate, then propagate along the thickness of the plate with creating tiber debonding. The crack grow along the fiber direction with occurring 60∼80dB AE signal. During the penetration, the fiber breakage was observed. As fiber orientation increases, talc fiber breakage occurs more frequently. The AE signal behaviors support these results. Cumulative AE counts could well predict crack initiation and crack propagation and AE amplitude were useful for the prediction of damage failure mode.