Abstract Aerial scene classification, which is a fundamental problem for remote sensing imagery, can automatically label an aerial image with a specific semantic category. Although deep learning has achieved competitive performance for aerial scene classification, training the conventional neural networks with aerial datasets will easily stick in overfitting. Because the aerial datasets only contain a few hundreds or thousands images, meanwhile the conventional networks usually contain millions of parameters to be trained. To address the problem, a novel convolutional neural network named Justify Mentioned Net (JM-Net) is proposed in this paper, which has different size of convolution kernels in same layer and ignores the fully convolution layer, so it has fewer parameters and can be trained well on aerial datasets. Additionally, Cluster-SVM, a strategy to improve the accuracy and speed up the classification is used in the specific task. Finally, our method surpass the state-of-art result on the challenging AID dataset while cost shorter time and used smaller storage space.