Nepal Army uses cargo drones to reach flood-cut villages

What happened

In late August 2026, a Himalayan glacier broke off near the Nepal-China border, and floods ran down the rivers below it. Reuters reported on 9 September that at least 1,367 people had been confirmed dead and more than 5,000 were missing. Roads and bridges were destroyed, and many villages were cut off. Helicopters were busy with search and rescue, so moving food and medicine became a separate problem.

The Nepal Army turned to drones. According to Reuters, it uses four DJI FlyCart 100 cargo drones that China donated as part of a recent aid package. They make about 10 to 16 deliveries a day. Each flight covers 3 to 4 km and carries up to 60 kg, enough to cross a river where a bridge has gone. Loads include food, medicine and fuel, including across the Trishuli River at Devighat in Nuwakot.

The Kathmandu Post described other uses. On 31 August, a drone moved seven bodies from Devighat-3 to Devighat-5, a place rescuers found hard and dangerous to reach on foot. Another drone carried a loudspeaker over a village and asked people to raise their hands if they needed water, food or medicine. Residents wrote phone numbers on placards or in the mud. Supplies were also dropped on the roof of a four-storey school.

The Devighat team was an eight-member group led by the volunteer organisation Hami Nepal, with the companies Airlift Technology and GarudX, the Nepal Police, the Nepal Army and the Armed Police Force. Milan Pandey, director of Airlift Technology, told the Post his team supplied at least 1.5 tonnes of emergency goods in three days. Operators also flew a drone inside the flooded tunnel of the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project, where it found water and rocks but no sign of life.

The engineering behind it

A cargo drone of this kind is a multirotor. Several electric motors turn propellers, and a flight controller changes each motor's speed hundreds of times a second to keep the aircraft level and on course. The flight controller reads sensors such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, a compass and satellite positioning. This is a control problem: measure the error, compute a correction and apply it, over and over, while wind pushes the aircraft around.

Batteries set the limits. A battery can store only so much energy for its weight, and lifting a heavy load uses energy quickly. So there is always a trade between payload and range. The figures reported here show this. The Kathmandu Post gives the FlyCart 100's maximum payload as 85 kg and range as up to 4 km, while Reuters reports loads of up to 60 kg in the army's use. Operators told reporters that weather, range and payload were their main limits.

The radio link matters as much as the motors. The pilot, or the autopilot, must stay in contact with the drone across a river valley, where hills can block signals. Live video lets the operator see the drop point. Thermal cameras, which sense heat instead of visible light, can show a living person in places that are hard to search. The Post notes that thermal drones were used for this along the rivers.

Drones are also mapping tools. The Kathmandu Post cites World Bank findings that drones can produce aerial photos and terrain maps with more detail than standard satellite images. Repeated surveys can reveal small changes in the ground, which could help identify landslide and flood risk early. Building such maps from hundreds of overlapping photos is called photogrammetry, and it needs accurate positioning and careful processing.

What it means in Nepal

The Post traces how Nepal's drone skills have grown. After the 7.8-magnitude earthquake in 2015, international agencies brought drones to search for survivors and assess damage. Since then, much of the capability has been built locally. Airlift Technology assembles drones in Kathmandu from imported parts. In spring 2026, drones carried oxygen, medicine, ropes and ladders between Everest Base Camp and Camp I in six to seven minutes, a trip that can take climbers up to seven hours.

The Post also reports that Nepal's private sector has provided drone-based hazard risk assessment to Bhutan. Operators said drones were the cheapest way to move supplies compared with helicopters, though no cost figures were given. Pandey told the Post that Nepal needs a suitable policy to support this kind of use. The floods also hit hydropower sites: the Independent Power Producers' Association of Nepal reported about 900 workers missing at projects on the Trishuli and Bhote Koshi rivers.

For engineering students, the story points to two kinds of work. One is building and maintaining the aircraft: motors, batteries, radio links, flight controllers and the software that ties them together. The other is using drone data: surveying damaged roads and bridges, mapping riverbanks and planning reconstruction. Both need careful testing and a clear sense of the limits of the equipment, because a drone that fails over a river cannot be repaired in the air.