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Insect wing damage resulted from living environment or predation commonly happens in nature. This usually results in deterioration of insect’s flight performance and as a consequence, the insect needs adjustment of flapping wings to compensate the effect from the wing loss. In this study, a dragonfly (Erythemis simpliciolis) with and without wing loss is chosen to study the change of aerodynamic performance of flapping wings. Three cases including flight with intact wings (IW), flight with one-sided forewing damage (OFD), and flight with double-side forewing damage (DFD) are determined. An integrated study using high-speed photogrammetry, three-dimensional surface reconstruction, and direct numerical simulation (DNS) are used to quantify wing kinematics and aerodynamics performance. Results have shown that in general, during downstroke of forewings, forewing area loss could reduce insect’s lift production; The lift force generated by the outer wings is larger than or equal to that produced by the inner wings during downstroke, but the outer wings’ lift production becomes smaller than the inner wings’ during upstroke; Span-wise forewing area removal reduces forewing tip vorticity, and it leads to the detachment of the tip vortex ring during upstroke.