Instrument Landing System (ILS) is a critical navigation device for ensuring flight safety, whose signal quality affects the accuracy and safety of aircraft landing accuracy and safety directly. However, the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment around airports leads to more and more multipath effects, thereby impacting the reliability and precision of ILS signals significantly. Therefore, taking LOCalizer (LOC) as the research object, a signal propagation path analysis method based on backward ray-tracing method was proposed. In the method, by establishing an electromagnetic propagation model of the airport environment and incorporating ray-tracing and path validity determination rules, the propagation characteristics of ILS signals in multipath environments were investigated systematically. And the influence of signal reflection and diffraction effects caused by obstacles on the Difference in Depth of Modulation (DDM) of the airborne LOC receiving signals were particularly analyzed. Simulation results demonstrate that when obstacles are near the runway centerline, DDM experiences significant fluctuations, with the maximum jitter reached 283.4% of the value specified by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) approximately. And after adjusting the obstacle positions appropriately, occlusions between obstacles and the increased distance between obstacles and the runway centerline lead to a reduction in multipath interference. As a result, the fluctuation of DDM decreases significantly and meets the ICAO’s prescribed limit, with the maximum jitter reached 99.0% of the specified value approximately. The above verifies that this method can assess the impact of multipath propagation on ILS performance in complex airport environments effectively.