In the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, a drone carrying a 40 kilogram load of bananas swiftly lifts off from the rugged mountains. The feat is accomplished by Li Xianquan, who – at 41 years old and after two decades of hauling goods by truck – has traded the steering wheel for a remote control to become a drone pilot.

Within the past two years, the low-altitude economy has taken centre stage in tech and venture investment circles. Innovations like eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft or flying cars, brimming with futuristic allure, have been quick to capture imaginations and spark market excitement.

But what is unfolding in Li’s hillside orchard goes beyond a flashy display of technological prowess to make a measurable daily difference.

Bananas from areas with large temperature differences tend to be sweeter. However, carrying the fruit down steep mountains often causes bruising and damage, and is toilsome work for farmers.

Drones are also increasing the fruit’s growing area. More than 94 per cent of the land in Yunnan is sloped, with nearly 46 per cent of arable land on a gradient of over 15 degrees, according to the province’s agriculture department.

“Without the help of drones, I would never dare to cultivate on such steep mountainous terrain,” says a banana grower who leased this sharply sloped terrain in Yuxi, a city in the central part of Yunnan.

Unmet demands

A growing number of people in China are shifting to jobs like Li’s. Drone delivery represents a completely new business, with a vast unmet demand for skilled operators.

By June 2025, the country had recorded 2,726,000 registered drones, yet only about 250,000 licensed pilots were available – a shortfall of nearly 2.5 million. This gap risks growing, given the emphasis local governments are placing on vertical mobility as an emerging driver of growth.

To align with this momentum, the nation’s economic planning authority has launched a dedicated department to advance digital infrastructure, set to fuel the sector’s swifter expansion.

China’s drone market is forecast to experience continuous growth from 2024 to 2029, surpassing 600 billion yuan (£63.6bn) by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 25.6 per cent during this period, according to an industry report.

From the delivery of life-saving organs, serum and emergency medications to power grid inspection, glass curtain wall cleaning and transporting seafood across the sea, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are broadening their scope of operations.

Licensing boom

Zeng Yan, an admissions officer at Shanghai Funtastic Drone Training School, has noticed a marked increase in interest over the past year.

“Inquiries have jumped from one or two a week to two or three daily, with about half of them enrolling,” says Zeng.

Drone operators are required to obtain a licence from the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Operators are divided by ability into visual line of sight within 500 metres (VLOS) and beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), the latter demanding higher expertise and stricter standards.

Funtastic’s popular training programme for multi-rotor drones takes between 18 and 28 days, depending on VLOS or BVLOS levels, with costs varying from 9,800 to 15,800 yuan – a high charge offset by the promising job prospects and attractive salaries of a licensed drone operator.

The mini-programme “I Am a Drone Pilot” on WeChat, a leading messaging app in China, connects drone operators with jobs nationwide. Monthly salaries offered in the programme vary between 5,000 and 10,000 yuan.

But getting licensed is only the beginning. Pilots also need to learn specialist skills on the job.

Li practised for 37 days to master banana lifting. At first, locating bananas in the expansive green field was challenging. He then discovered that the drone’s camera is more sensitive to red, and instructed the farmers on the ground to wave red flags as markers once their crop was ready for lifting.

Rural opportunities

While factories in China’s eastern coastal cities reduce the number of workers by ramping up automation, emerging technologies such as UAVs are opening up new job prospects in the countryside, the primary source of the country’s millions of migrant workers.

Zigui, a county of Yichang city in central China’s Hubei province – renowned as the hometown of Chinese navel oranges – now boasts more than 800 drones. Its count of drone pilots has grown from 50-plus to more than 2,000.

The majority are young people in their twenties and thirties returning from cities to their rural hometowns. They bring new technologies to the countryside while replenishing the ageing and shrinking rural labour pool.

Once a hairdresser in the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen, Wang Jiaxin switched to transporting navel oranges with drones in his hometown of Zigui two years ago, having watched a video of drones spraying orchards on hilly terrain, which he saw as the future of farming.

“Older farmers used to carry oranges on their backs across the steep terrains – a hard labour that few young people today are willing to do,” Wang says.

A drone can transport 50 kilograms per trip, spanning 200 metres horizontally in just one minute, compared with the 30 minutes it would take a person to carry the same load, says Wang.

At present, drone operators remain in short supply, driving up their value. “My phone kept ringing from dawn to dusk,” says Wang of the flood of orders from local farmers during the harvest season, when he can make up to 30,000 yuan a month – “significantly higher than my salary as a hairdresser”.

During non-harvest months, drone pilots can supplement their income with pesticide spraying, typically earning between 5,000 and 8,000 yuan.

The remarkable economic benefits have also prompted the local government to strengthen policy support. In early 2024, the human resource authority in Changyang Tujia autonomous county of Yichang offered a free 12-day drone training course. In 2025, the city of Yichang held 30 drone training sessions, subsidising 606 trainees with 808,000 yuan.

In addition to subsidies, the Zigui government has upgraded infrastructure by clearing obstacles, as well as building drone platforms and charging stations.

On China’s social platforms, many videos of drones transporting agricultural products have gone viral. After seeing such clips, more migrant workers decided to return home and become drone operators, freeing older generations from manual labour.

One comment under some footage quipped: “No wonder oranges are pricey. They’re delivered by air.” A drone pilot replied seriously: “I think our parents’ shoulders were far more precious.”