The invention discloses a formation cooperation navigation method for an unmanned aerial vehicle. During formation of the unmanned aerial vehicle, a lead aircraft unmanned aerial vehicle node is carried with an inertial navigation system and a GPS receiver, the posture, speed and position are estimated through airborne inertial navigation/GPS fusion filtering, and high-precision posture, speed andposition navigation information of the lead aircraft unmanned aerial vehicle node is obtained; other unmanned aerial vehicle nodes are carried with the inertial navigation system, a vision navigationdevice and a light stream sensor, through the vision navigation device, the relative distance of the unmanned aerial vehicle and a lead aircraft, a pitch angle and an azimuth angle are obtained, absolute position information of the adjacent lead aircraft unmanned aerial vehicle nodes is mathematically solved, speed information of the unmanned aerial vehicle is obtained through solution of the light stream sensor, and the airborne inertial navigation error is corrected through Kalamn filtering. In addition, the relative distance between the unmanned aerial vehicle node, further away from the lead aircraft, in formation and other unmanned aerial vehicle nodes is solved through the vision navigation device, and based on the relative distance, the absolute position information is solved.