Based on the flight characteristics and the control strategy of UAVs with fixed wings, the temporal network and the cellular automata theory are used to analyze the failure influence mechanism of the swarm UAV in the case of malicious attack to controllers. Firstly, the change of the topology network of the swarm UAV is studied by the temporal network, and a method based on hop number is then proposed to determine the fault propagation path. Secondly, utilizing the status information of the swarm UAV, the cellular object that satisfies the characteristics of the swarm UAVs is established. Based on the principle of local information interaction, the state conversion rules are determined so that the dynamic change of the influence degree of UAVs failure can be identified, by which the weights of failure influence are determined using the vector projection method according to the influence of the neighbour information on the control law of a UAV. Finally, after building a simulation model, the prediction results compared with the actual fault influence degree are obtained via the DCG algorithm and model distance, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed fault influence model.