Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) has been widely used in various aircraft structural components. However, it is difficult for conventional methods such as drilling and helical milling to meet the requirements on high quality and efficient holes creation. Hence a so-called tilt helical milling (THM) method has been proposed. This new method is performed by replacing the revolving motion of the tool in conventional helical milling (CHM) with a conical pendulum motion, in which the tool axis is tilted towards the hole axis at a certain angle. As a step toward the establishment of the new method, in this work, the fundamental drilling characteristics of CFRP by the THM is elucidated by experimentally investigating the effects of tilt angle on thrust force and delamination factor. The obtained experimental results demonstrated that thrust force and delamination factor can be reduced with THM technique. In addition, THM can achieve better hole surface finish than CHM.