The invention discloses a distributed unmanned aerial vehicle formation change method, relates to the technical field of unmanned aerial vehicle flight, solves the problems of high communication overhead and low reliability of formation change information transmission and the problem of distributed formation synchronization, and enhances the safety of distributed formation change. According to thespecific scheme, the method comprises the following steps: S1, presetting related instructions of all formation patterns on all unmanned aerial vehicles, and sequentially performing numbering according to the number of the formation patterns; s2, sending serial number signals of the formation needing to be changed to all the unmanned aerial vehicles through a control station; s3, enabling all theunmanned aerial vehicles to receive the serial number signals in the S2, automatically generating a leader plane according to instructions of the unmanned aerial vehicles in the S1, wherein the otherunmanned aerial vehicles are wing planes; and S4, enabling the lead aircraft to adjust the position of the lead aircraft according to the instruction of the lead aircraft, and enabling all the wing aircrafts to adjust the positions of the wing aircrafts according to the instruction of the lead aircrafts. According to the invention, the idea of instruction number mapping formation is adopted, so that the communication overhead caused by directly sending the formation matrix can be greatly reduced.