Backlash is common in mechanical and hydraulic systems and severely limits overall system performance. In this paper, the development of an adaptive control scheme for systems with unknown backlash is presented. An adaptive backlash inverse based controller is applied to a plant that has an unknown backlash in its input. The harmful effects of backlash are presented. Compensation for backlash by adding a discrete adaptive backlash inverse structure and the gradient-type adaptive algorithm, which provides the estimated backlash parameters, are also presented. The supposed adaptive backlash control algorithms are applied to an aircraft with unknown backlash in the actuator of control surfaces. Simulation results show that the proposed compensation scheme improves the tracking performance of systems with backlash.