Nepal flew its first heavy-lift cargo drone test across the Trishuli River on Saturday, four days after a glacier collapse sent a wall of mud through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli valleys. The same day, the country’s foreign minister asked other governments for cargo drones. Across the border in Tibet, China had 47 drones on the ground and a Wing Loong aircraft overhead serving as a flying cell tower by Thursday evening.

The gap between those two responses is the story. Nepal has some of the most experienced high-altitude cargo drone pilots anywhere, the crews that fly supplies and haul trash on Everest, and it still took until the weekend to stage a single 130-pound (59 kg) delivery flight in a schoolyard in Bidur. The vest on one of Saturday’s pilots carried the name of the company I have covered since its first Everest season in 2024.

The disaster killed at least 669 people in Nepal and seven in Tibet as of Saturday, with about 2,426 still missing in Nepal and 554 in Tibet’s Gyirong County, according to Reuters figures reported by CNBC. The United Nations counts roughly 10,000 affected households.

Nepal Tests A 220-Pound Cargo Drone Four Days After The Flood

On Saturday afternoon, about a dozen drone operators, army volunteers and police officers gathered in Devighat, in Bidur, to test whether a heavy-lift drone could carry supplies across the Trishuli River. The aircraft was rated for 220 pounds (100 kg). The first flight carried 130 pounds (59 kg).

That is how The New York Times described the scene from Bidur, where reporter Anupreeta Das and photographer Atul Loke watched the test. The packages held rice, instant noodles, clothing and sanitary pads, tied under the airframe with ropes and carabiners while light rain slowed the work. The drone crossed the river low, hovered while testers on the far bank unloaded the cargo, and came back. Round trip: about three minutes.

Some of the pilots had already dropped packages high in the Himalayas. One wore a vest reading “Airlift Drone Pilot,” the mark of Airlift Technology, the Nepali operator DroneXL has followed since it replaced Sherpa porters on the Khumbu Icefall with a DJI FlyCart 30 in 2024 and hauled trash off Everest this spring. The gray multirotor in Loke’s photographs, roughly the size of a dining table with its arms extended, carries Airlift branding and a DJI harness strap. The Times did not name the model.

The group ran the test several more times and now plans to take the results to the authorities, who will decide whether drone delivery gets folded into the official relief effort. Nepal’s Armed Police Force was already flying drone deliveries of food rations, drinking water, medicines and other supplies to stranded residents in the Devighat area on Saturday, according to a video posted on X by India TV correspondent Manish Prasad.

The country needed it faster. The flood destroyed more than 35 bridges and damaged around 25 miles (40 km) of road, including sections of the main highways, per the Times. On Aug. 26, the day of the disaster, the government publicly asked helicopter and drone operators, including the Nepal Drone Association, to coordinate with district offices, Nepal News reported. Nepal Police told reporters the next morning that its own contribution was modest. “Four drones have also been mobilized for search and rescue operations,” Deputy Inspector General Abhi Narayan Kapale said, per ANI.

By Saturday, Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal was asking abroad. Nepal has requested heavy-lift cargo drones from international partners to reach cut-off mountain settlements, Khanal told a Kathmandu news conference, according to the Kathmandu Post. Steep gorges and unpredictable weather limit where large helicopters can go, he said.

China Puts 47 Drones And A Flying Cell Tower Over Gyirong

China’s National Fire and Rescue Administration had 681 firefighters, 13 rescue dogs, 113 vehicles and 47 drones in Gyirong County by Thursday evening, a day and a half after the mudslide buried the border port. A Wing Loong aircraft carrying cellular base stations was orbiting overhead by 2 a.m.

The numbers come from CCTV via CNN and from Xinhua. The Wing Loong, a civilian version of AVIC’s armed reconnaissance drone, took off from Sichuan and reached the disaster zone at 2 a.m. Thursday with cameras and cellular base stations aboard. AVIC told the Global Times the aircraft logged about 6,069 user connections and 661 calls in that first stretch, and that its anti-icing system kept it flying in the weather. A second Wing Loong joined it by Saturday, per Xinhua, and on Sunday the agency reported that signal had reached the core rescue site at the port.

The same ministry ran this playbook over flooded Guangxi in July, when two Wing Loongs restored mobile coverage more than 8,000 times while 300 volunteer pilots flew agricultural drones as an improvised cargo airline, Xinhua reported at the time. Seven weeks later it ran again in the Himalayas. That is what a rehearsed system looks like.

Nepal’s side of the border had no airborne base station. Nepal Telecom and Ncell lost 87 towers between them in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading, OnlineKhabar reported, and restored them the slow way, flying generators and technicians in by helicopter and carrying gear on porters’ backs where the roads were gone, according to Nepal Telecom’s updates.

Drones Carry Rescuers And Supplies Where The Roads Ended

At Gyirong Port, Chinese advance teams reached the buried border gate by three routes: rubber boats, on foot through the mountains, and heavy-lift drone transport. On Saturday, cargo drones launched from a supply zone 1.9 miles (3 km) away were resupplying the 21 rescuers already at the gate.

That account is Xinhua’s, from an Aug. 29 briefing by a Ministry of Emergency Management official, and it lists heavy-lift drone transport alongside land and water routes as a way advance personnel moved toward the core zone. CGTN reported eleven drone pilots with seven reconnaissance drones and two heavy-lift aircraft assigned to surveys and area searches by civil rescue groups. Xinhua’s own framing is worth keeping: drones remain a supplement to the 2,141 rescuers on the ground.

A video circulating under Nepal hashtags this weekend shows a person dangling from a heavy-lift drone over a flooded road. That footage is from Yunbiao in Guangxi on July 6, not Nepal, and the account that reposted it said so in its own caption. I covered that rescue when it happened: a firefighter crew hoisted a truck driver off the roof of a fuel tanker as the water rose around him. A second widely shared clip, a night flight in which a drone carries a figure past a rescuer in a China Fire and Rescue uniform, shows drone-borne transport of some kind. The post that spread it claims drones are ferrying people across rivers in Nepal; the uniform is Chinese, the clip carries a third-party watermark, and no news outlet has placed it in Nepal or tied it to this disaster. Treat it as unconfirmed.

The View From 23,600 Feet Shows Where The Flood Began

Drone footage shot at more than 23,600 feet (7,200 m) and shared on Chinese social media shows a slab of glacier breaking off at about 17,000 feet (5,200 m) and falling roughly 3,300 feet (1 km) into the valley below. A BBC analysis matched the location to the Trishuli watershed.

The collapse released the seismic energy of a magnitude-5.2 earthquake and sent a slurry of ice and rock down the Lende Khola at around 110 mph (180 km/h) for more than 12 miles (20 km), according to the reconstruction Ynetnews compiled from Chinese and Nepali sources. The Trishuli rose about 30 feet (9 m) in half an hour.

Lower down, drones have done the work cameras always do after a disaster and something more. CNN drone footage from Nuwakot showed half a bridge left standing in a mud-caked valley. Chinese teams flew reconnaissance drones ahead of every foot patrol into Gyirong Port so crews would know where the ground was too soft to stand on. Both countries are watching two new barrier lakes by satellite and drone; one was 99,000 square meters (24 acres) and draining on Saturday morning, the other still growing, per the Mappr summary of official figures. If either breaches, the drone crews in Bidur will be delivering supplies into a second flood.

DroneXL’s Take

Nepal’s problem this week was never hardware. Its private operators fly DJI FlyCart aircraft to 19,685 feet on Everest and flew a U.S.-built Freefly Alta X on Ama Dablam in June. Its government spent four days on helicopters, ran one schoolyard test, then asked abroad for aircraft its citizens fly.

I don’t think that is an accident. In April the Home Ministry refused Freefly a test permit on Everest and suspended Airlift’s FlyCart 100 permit in the same stroke, citing its UAV regulations and the need for “wider stakeholder consultation.” The DJI permit came back in five days and the aircraft went on to move 22,207 pounds (10,073 kg) of cargo on Everest this season. What never got written, as far as I can find, is the page that tells a district officer in Nuwakot how to call that aircraft in when a bridge is gone. The regulator that treated cargo drones as an expedition permit question in April is learning in August that they are disaster infrastructure.

China wrote that page after the Henan floods in 2021 and ran it in Guangxi in July and Gyirong this week. Its Wing Loong deployment is the single most useful thing any drone did in this disaster: 6,069 phone connections from a place where every tower was under mud. Nothing comparable flew over Rasuwa; the Nepali carriers rebuilt tower by tower. Airborne base stations need a state that owns long-endurance aircraft and carriers willing to hang their equipment underneath. That is a policy gap, and it is the strongest argument I have seen for Western governments to stop treating cargo and communications drones as someone else’s experiment.

Helicopters still did most of the saving here, and they should have. More than 3,200 people came out by air, and no 100-kilogram drone lifts a family off a roof. The Guangxi tanker rescue was a one-off that I called usually illegal for good reason. Where drones win is the last mile after the helicopter leaves: the three-minute round trip across a river that used to have a bridge, and the phone signal that lets a survivor tell someone she is alive.

Whether Nepal’s request for heavy-lift drones gets answered, and by whom, is the thing to watch this week. Volunteers on X are already offering Indian-built BonV Aero and Marut cargo aircraft. DJI sells the FlyCart 100 and the 200-kilogram FlyCart 200, and Nepal knows the paperwork for both. The country that grounded two cargo drones over a permit question in April has the chance to write its drone doctrine in mud, in real time, while the barrier lakes hold.

Sources: The New York Times, Xinhua, CNN, ANI, Kathmandu Post, Nepal News, OnlineKhabar, Global Times, CGTN, CNBC/Reuters, Ynetnews, Mappr

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.