To improve the safety and reliability of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (QUAVs) with limited communication, system uncertainties, and unknown external disturbances in a highly uncertain and safety-critical environment, a distributed adaptive human-in-the-loop event-triggered (ET) formation controller is proposed. The nonautonomous leader is controlled by receiving control commands decided by the gesture recognition system, and the followers are controlled indirectly via the connected communication network. Thus, the safety and flexibility of the closed-loop system are improved. The designed controller is quantized and then sent to the actuator only at the ET instants to further reduce the network burden. The radial basis function neural network is used to approximate the system uncertainties. The unknown approximation error and the unknown external disturbance are viewed as a compound disturbance compensated by the high-order disturbance observer. In addition, the uniformly ultimately bounded stability of the closed-loop system is achieved through the Lyapunov method. Finally, comparative experiments are implemented on the QUAVs to demonstrate the validity of the presented control scheme.