<p>This paper investigates the event-triggered formation control for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under external disturbances, wake interference, and deception attacks. Firstly, a second-order kinematic model for each UAV is formulated, by involving compound disturbance and cyber-attack into the derived system. Secondly, in order to avoid internal collision, an improved prescribed performance function (PPF) is proposed to tackle asymmetric constraint of formation tracking error. Thirdly, for each follower, a disturbance observer (DO) is presented to estimate the disturbance, while an estimator is designed to estimate the cyber-attack, all of which include the probability of attack occurrence. Fourthly, by combining the advantages of two kinds of existent event-triggered mechanisms (ETMs) and threshold function, a novel design of distributed switching ETM is presented to achieve a better balance between less data transmissions and desired control performance. Subsequently, based on above estimations, tracking errors, and triggered signals, a cooperative controller is presented and a comprehensive closed-loop system is established. Then, after analyzing the stability, a co-design approach for determining the observer gains, controller gains, and triggering parameters is presented in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed control strategy are validated by exploiting the simulated results.</p>