As modern air combat concepts continue to evolve, higher requirements have been put forward for the flight attitude and position change speed of UAVs in air combat. The traditional maneuver control method relies on the characteristics of pilot manipulation, but it appears to be highly dependent and poorly versatile under the development trend of modern air warfare mechanization, informationization and intelligence. This paper proposes a maneuver control method based on the velocity vector, which fully considers that the maneuver action in modern air warfare mainly aims to meet the conditions of fire control radar system detecting and tracking targets and weapon launching, simplifies the maneuver action into the requirement of UAV velocity vector, realizes the conversion calculation of the velocity command to the stick command by decoupling the velocity vector command into the vertical normal overload command and the horizontal roll angle command. The simulation results demonstrate that the designed speed vector control method aligns with actual air combat scenarios and has practical value.