In this work, the inner and outer loop control strategy is adopted for the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) formation system. Firstly, a sliding mode control method based on memory event?triggered mechanism (METM) is proposed for the position subsystem under delay and disturbance. The second?order model is established for each UAV, and the leader?follower framework is adopted to realize the desired flight formation. Secondly, an adaptive METM is proposed to alleviate the transmission burden, in which control input feedback is introduced. For the resulting communication delay of the control input in the proposed METM and the external disturbance to the system, a sliding mode controller is designed, which maintains desirable control performance and solves the influence of communication delay and bounded disturbance to a certain extent. Thirdly, the stability of the closed?loop system is proved by applying Lyapunov theory and H_∞ control theory, and a method that facilitates solving controller gain and triggering parameter through a series of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) is proposed. Moreover, based on the obtained virtual control quantity, a tracking controller is designed for the attitude subsystem. Finally, a simulated example is exploited to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.