Many experimental data of fatigue crack propagation show that the fatigue crack propagation process is stochastic. Therefore, the study on the crack propagation must be based on the probabilistic approach. In the present paper, fatigue crack propagation process is assumed to be a discrete Markov process and the method is developed, which can evaluate the reliability of the structural component by using Markov chain model(Unit step B-model) suggested by Bogdanoff. In this method, leak failure, plastic collapse and brittle fracture of the critical component are taken as failure modes, and the effects of initial crack distribution, periodic and non-periodic inspection on the probability of failure are considered. In this method, an equivalent load value for random loading such as wave load is used to facilitate the analysis. Finally some calculations are carried out in order to show the usefulness and the applicability of this method. And then some remarks on this method are mentioned.