Critical load-bearing structures of aircraft fuselages are predominantly assembled by riveting, and fatigue cracks are highly prone to initiate at the riveted locations. Timely detection of such cracks and acquisition of their location, length, and other relevant information are of great significance for structural damage assessment and maintenance. Conventional nondestructive testing techniques are difficult to apply for in-service inspection, whereas pulsed eddy current testing offers a deep penetration depth and rich detection information, thus providing significant advantages in detecting deep-seated buried defects. To address the detection of buried defects around rivet holes in aircraft riveted structures, a pulsed eddy current rotational differential probe has been designed. The probe is equipped with a horizontally placed rectangular excitation coil and two tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors, and incorporates a central circular hole to accommodate the rivet head, thereby reducing structural interference. Subsequently, the rotational detection principles of both the absolute probe and the differential probe are investigated, and the defect signal expressions for the two types of probes during rotational detection are theoretically derived and compared. Next, a pulsed eddy current testing system is established and rotational detection experiments are conducted on riveted specimens containing defects. By combining the experimental results with the theoretical derivations, a rotational characteristic amplitude curve is constructed, and its peak-to-peak value is extracted as the characteristic value of the rotational differential probe. Finally, defects with different parameters in the multilayer riveted structures are detected. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed rotational differential probe can locate defects and detect a minimum defect size of 4 mm×0.2 mm×1 mm (length × width × depth) at a buried depth of 6 mm. Moreover, the characteristic amplitude of the defect increases with increasing defect length. Probe comparison results indicate that the rotational differential probe outperforms the absolute probe in terms of both linearity and detection sensitivity.