L-band digital aeronautical communication system 1 (L-DACS1) is a promising candidate data-link for future air-ground communication, but it is severely interfered by the pulse pairs (PPs) generated by distance measure equipment. A novel PP mitigation approach is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a deformed PP detection (DPPD) method that combines a filter bank, correlation detection, and rescanning is proposed to detect the deformed PPs (DPPs) which are caused by multiple filters in the receiver. Secondly, a finite impulse response (FIR) model is used to approximate the overall characteristic of filters, and then the waveform of DPP can be acquired by the original waveform of PP and the FIR model. Finally, sparse representation is used to estimate the position and amplitude of each DPP, and then reconstruct each DPP. The reconstructed DPPs will be subtracted from the contaminated signal to mitigate interference. Numerical experiments show that the bit error rate performance of our approach is about 5 dB better than that of recent works and is closer to interference-free environment. (C) 2016 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd.