Nepal’s army is flying four DJI FlyCart 100 cargo drones, all donated by China, on 10 to 16 relief runs a day across the Trishuli River, two weeks after the government asked foreign governments for exactly that kind of aircraft. The drones carry up to 132 pounds (60 kg) of food, medicine and fuel per trip to villages that lost their roads and bridges on Aug. 26, and drones have also carried bodies out of areas rescuers cannot reach on foot.
The official toll stood at 1,369 dead and 5,132 missing in Nepal as of Sept. 9, among them 587 foreign nationals. Chinese officials count 43 dead and 519 missing on the Tibetan side.
The aircraft doing the lifting is one the United States put in a 100% tariff bracket on Sept. 3, eight days after the glacier broke, and one the Federal Communications Commission proposes to bar from American sale outright.
Nepal’s Army Flies Four Donated FlyCart 100s From Devighat
The four FlyCart 100s arrived in a Chinese aid package and now fly relief across the Trishuli from Devighat in Nuwakot district, Reuters reported on Sept. 9. Each run covers 2 to 2.5 miles (3 to 4 km) with up to 132 pounds (60 kg) of food, medicine and fuel.
“There is no other way to send food, essentials, medicine and fuel, except for drones,” contract army pilot Santosh Budhathoki told Reuters, because the army’s helicopters are tied up in rescue. Milan Pandey of Airlift Technology, the Nepali operator whose crews DroneXL has followed since they replaced Sherpa porters on the Khumbu Icefall in 2024, is running the flights, and told Reuters the crews have been shuttling since early morning.
That closes the question DroneXL left open on Aug. 30, when Nepal had run one schoolyard test flight and asked abroad for heavy-lift drones while China had 47 drones flying on its side of the border. Beijing answered with the heaviest aircraft on the scene. India’s Garuda Aerospace also sent pilots and its Sanjeevani logistics drones, rated for 55 pounds (25 kg), to Rasuwa district, the company said, less than half of what one FlyCart run carries.
By Sept. 9 drones had delivered 1,591 kilograms (3,508 pounds) of food to cut-off villages, according to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, whose situation report also carries the death and missing figures. Reuters reported that drones have moved flood victims’ bodies in some areas, and reconnaissance drones have been in constant use for search and rescue.
DJI Rates The FlyCart 100 At 187 Pounds And Nepal Flies It At 132
DJI’s own spec sheet rates the FlyCart 100 for 187 pounds (85 kg) on two batteries and 220 pounds (100 kg) on one, hung from a 98-foot (30 m) winch line. Nepal’s crews load 132 pounds (60 kg), a margin that buys range and wind tolerance.
DJI launched the aircraft globally on Dec. 4, 2025, and DroneXL walked through its sensor stack at the time: LiDAR, front and rear radar, a quad-vision system, a parachute, and an IP55 rating for dust and rain. The same model spent the spring hauling 22,207 pounds (10,073 kg) of cargo between Everest Base Camp and Camp 1, work DroneXL covered in July, which is why Nepal already had licensed pilots for it when the flood came.
DJI’s payload figures are measured at sea level in still air, and the spec sheet says capacity falls with takeoff altitude. Devighat sits low in the valley, well below where that derating bites on DJI’s own numbers, so the gap between 60 and 85 kilograms is operating margin, not the aircraft’s limit.
Small Drones Search Hydropower Tunnels Packed With Mud
Away from the cargo runs, thermal drones are hunting for roughly 900 workers still missing from 12 hydropower projects, about 500 of them believed to be inside plant tunnels, the Associated Press reported. The flood filled some tunnels end to end. A drone can only fly the straight ones.
Filmmaker and drone pilot Manish Maharjan joined the army’s search a day after the flood and told the AP that at the Rasuwagadhi hydropower project he flew a drone to the end of the tunnel and found no air pocket at all. “We found tunnels were filled with mud like toothpaste in a tube,” he said. Bends and zigzags stop the search where the signal drops.
On open hillsides the same drones did better. Maharjan mounted speakers on them to call out to stranded people and play music, and helped rescue teams find survivors that way in the first days after the flood.
Washington Put A 100% Tariff On This Aircraft Eight Days After The Flood
President Trump’s Aug. 13 proclamation put a 100% tariff on imported drones with a maximum takeoff weight above 55 pounds (25 kg), effective Sept. 3. The FlyCart 100 takes off at 330 pounds (149.9 kg). Each of the four aircraft feeding Nuwakot clears that bar six times over.
DroneXL reported the proclamation the day it was signed. One day before the tariff started, on Sept. 2, public comments closed on the FCC’s proposal to end U.S. sales of thermal, LiDAR, docking, spraying and heavy-lift drones it had previously approved, a proceeding DroneXL has tracked since the commission put every foreign drone on the Covered List in December 2025.
The American alternative has been to Nepal and back. This spring the Home Ministry refused Freefly a permit to fly its Alta X Gen 2 on Everest and suspended Airlift’s FlyCart 100 permit in the same stroke; the DJI permit came back in five days, the Freefly one never did, and Airlift flew the Alta X on Ama Dablam instead in June, with the U.S. Embassy applauding. Pandey told The Wall Street Journal, per Ars Technica, that at Everest altitudes the DJI aircraft lifts about 100 pounds to the Freefly’s 11, and costs less. The embassy’s July post on the Ama Dablam flights gave no payload figure.
DroneXL’s Take
Nepal asked the world for heavy-lift drones on Aug. 29. China had four in the air by Sept. 4, the date on the first AFP frames from Trishuli, and they are the best aircraft in the class. That is the whole story, and it is a story about the United States.
I want to be fair to Beijing’s motives, because they are not charitable. Four FlyCarts over Rasuwa are soft power at a price DJI can write off, and China gets to be the country whose drones fed the survivors while its own side of the border counts 519 missing. Nobody in Washington should mistake this for altruism. But the American answer to a donated DJI aircraft doing good work cannot be a customs bill and a docket to ban it, because that answer leaves the next Nepal with the same choice and one fewer bidder.
The tariff, as I see it, protects no one who builds anything. Freefly makes a serious heavy lifter in Washington State, Blue-listed and NDAA-compliant, and Nepal still would not let it fly Everest. The 100% rate does not fix that. It raises the price of the aircraft an American county emergency manager would buy tomorrow if a river took the bridge, and it does so while the FCC weighs whether that manager may buy it at all. Protecting a domestic industry means giving it stages to prove itself on, which is what Ama Dablam was. Taxing the competitor out of the country while the competitor donates aircraft to the disaster of the year is how you lose the argument in front of the people who decide it.
The number I keep coming back to is 11 pounds. If Pandey’s figure holds, and it is one operator’s account relayed through the Journal, the American aircraft lifts a tenth of the Chinese one at altitude. That is an engineering gap, not a policy gap, and no tariff closes it. What closes it is the thing DroneXL has argued for since the FlyCart 30 first flew Everest: American companies competing on the same mountains, in the same disasters, on merit. Nepal’s next request will come after the next glacier. Whether an American aircraft is on the list of what arrives is the question worth watching, and the FCC’s answer to its own docket will decide part of it.
Sources: Reuters (via CBC News), Associated Press, Nepal NDRRMA situation report, DJI, Ars Technica
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
