Dryland covering 41% of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface involves regions where land degradation and desertification are the most prominent global environmental problems. For restoring the degraded ecosystem, artificial afforestation of native or exotic species has been widely implemented, of which aerial-seeding afforestation was one of the effective measures owing to its penetration capability in inaccessible areas and labor- and cost-saving characteristics. Thus, this measure is crucial for understanding the change in soil physicochemical property with the aerial-seeding community succession in arid regions. To identify the effect of aerial-seeding afforestation on soil physical properties, the study selected one migratory dune (CK) and six aerial-seeding communities of successional sequence from 1984 to 2018 in the Alxa Desert to analyze the change in soil physical properties and their relationship. Compared with CK, the results show that slit and very fine sand increased by 2.6% and 7.6%, respectively, fine sand decreased by 27.1%, and sand and very coarse sand increased by 15.0% and 0.5% after 37 a, respectively. Compared with the other areas and afforesting means, the aerial-seeding afforestation has minimal effect on soil texture improvement, suggesting that the transition of soil texture from sand to loam is difficult in the short term. Otherwise, the saturated moisture content decreased while dry bulk density increased, which may induce an increase in sand and very coarse sand. The mass moisture content was significantly positive with very fine sand content, that is, the former increased with aerial-seeding ages; however, this content demonstrated differentiation patterns among soil layers, as indicated by a 0.7% reduction in deep layers and a 0.6% increase in shallow layers. Soil mass and saturated water contents were significantly negatively correlated with dry bulk density and uncorrelated with saturated infiltration rate, while the latter two were negatively relevant. Except for the mass water content, the other aforementioned contents were correlated with soil particle size content. Overall, the aerial-seeding afforestation also has positive but limited effects on the improvement of soil texture in the short term and enhanced the soil water-holding capacity and soil water availability. The differentiation of mass moisture content among soil top and deep layers induced community succession from shrub to grass.