This paper studies the formation control of swarm UAVs and designs a new distributed control method. Each UAV only needs to consider the information of its neighboring UAVs and the virtual leader. By constructing a new artificial potential function, virtual attractive and repulsive forces are generated between UAVs, so that the UAVs can maintain the desired distance during flight. On this basis, the relative positional relationship between each UAV and the virtual leader is designed using the consistency method, so that swarm UAVs can generate and maintain the basic formation. The simulation results of formation generation and formation maintenance illustrates the effectiveness and rationality of the method.