This paper proposed an adaptive terminal sliding mode control strategy for disturbance rejection control of a rotary-wing flight robot equipped with a 2-DOF cable-driven manipulator. The system has been divided into quadrotor subsystem and manipulator subsystem. The dynamical model of quadrotor has been obtained by Lagrange method. And the dynamical model of manipulator has been deduced by Newton-Euler equation. Then, the dynamical model of quadrotor has been simplified in hovering. And the motion of the manipulator which is regarded as perturbed force and moment is added into the dynamical of quadrotor. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is tested through three simulation case. The results show that the proposed controller is superior to other controllers in terms of tracking accuracy, robustness and disturbance rejection. The control performances of x and y channels are sensitive to the manipulator motion. The proposed controller has a good performance for the rotary-wing flight robot in hovering, which has an engineering referenced value.