At dawn on the Yangtze River in Wuhan, Hubei Province, morning mist drifts across the water as a drone automatically lifts off from its docking station on a riverside pontoon. It follows a pre-set route for autonomous patrol, transmitting high-definition footage of bridge areas, shoals, and navigational aids in real time. Meanwhile, the "Waterway Vision" command platform onshore receives aerial data simultaneously, allowing staff to complete a full "cloud-based inspection" of the entire waterway without leaving their desks. Drones have now become the Yangtze River Waterway Bureau's elite sky sentinels guarding this golden waterway.
Entering the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the Yangtze River Waterway Bureau is accelerating smart transportation development. By promoting the full-scale, region-wide deployment of drone inspections and pioneering an integrated air-water intelligent inspection model, the bureau has achieved multiple breakthroughs in waterway management—improving quality, boosting efficiency, and reducing risks—injecting strong momentum into the construction of a smart Yangtze River waterway system.
Comprehensive Deployment: A Full Three-Dimensional Inspection Network
The Yangtze River Waterway Bureau has made drone applications a core driver of waterway governance modernization. Through coordinated planning of equipment, pilots, and drone docking stations, it has completed the leap from local pilot projects to full-scale deployment across the entire mainline of the Yangtze River. Currently, 14 waterway management units under the bureau are equipped with over 170 drones of various types, 34 standardized drone docking stations have been built and put into operation, and more than 50 certified professional pilots have been trained, including 36 beyond-visual-line-of-sight operators. This professional flight team now covers key navigational segments across the upper, middle, and lower reaches of the Yangtze.
During flood season, the Nantong section of the Yangtze experiences swift currents and heavy vessel traffic near bridge areas, leaving limited maneuvering space for navigation marks. As early as August last year, the Nantong Waterway Office deployed drones for waterway patrols, unlocking a new perspective on channel inspection. Drones can rapidly reach areas that traditional inspection methods struggle to access in a short time, transmitting high-definition imagery and data in real time. They conduct comprehensive, high-precision monitoring of vessel traffic status, navigational aid conditions, and surrounding water environments, enabling waterway authorities to grasp the situation immediately and identify and address potential issues promptly.
Since the start of this year, the Yangtze River Waterway Bureau has continued to expand its equipment inventory, and by year-end, it will achieve full coverage of 72 flyable grassroots waterway offices. Leveraging drones, video surveillance, remote telemetry terminals for navigational aids, and waterway maintenance vessels, the bureau has established a "four-in-one" air-water three-dimensional inspection system that thoroughly covers bridge navigation areas, shoal evolution zones, geological hazard sites, and other blind spots for traditional vessel patrols. In the first half of the year, cumulative drone inspection hours across the entire waterway surpassed 1,582 hours, with each drone flying an average of 2.2 hours per month and executing 6 inspection missions. Overall inspection efficiency has improved by more than 50% compared to traditional vessel patrols, achieving a leap-forward enhancement in waterway data collection coverage and emergency response speed.
Multi-Scenario Integration: Transforming Maintenance Models for Quality and Efficiency
The Yangtze River Waterway Bureau has fully leveraged the rapid mobility and contactless operation advantages of drones, innovatively implementing a standardized workflow of "drone first inspection, vessel follow-up verification and handling." This covers navigational aid fault verification, waterway facility damage inspection, construction site supervision, and emergency incident reconnaissance, enabling "minute-level" on-site evidence collection and verification for all types of navigation hazards.
Technological innovation continues to unlock new "drone+" operational scenarios. The bureau pioneered the "drone + flexible robotic arm" automatic navigational aid light replacement technology, completing remote, fully automated light replacement in just 15 minutes per unit—three times more efficient than manual operations near water. Paired with drone-mounted high-pressure water cannons for contactless cleaning and maintenance of navigational aids, this significantly reduces the safety risks of staff working near water or at heights. Additionally, drones equipped with LiDAR technology conduct shoreline surveys and 3D waterway modeling, achieving centimeter-level accuracy in surveying results, providing a precise digital foundation for shoal evolution analysis and waterway regulation projects.
In the field of emergency rescue, drones have been integrated into the Yangtze River Waterway Bureau's comprehensive emergency response system. In the face of sudden incidents such as vessel collisions with navigational aids, ship groundings, or bank slope geological disasters, drones can immediately take off for close-range reconnaissance, transmitting real-time site imagery to support command and dispatch operations. This opens a fast-track channel connecting incident detection, assessment, and dispatch across the entire chain.
Dual Drivers: Strengthening the Standardized and Smart Operational Foundation
To ensure safe, compliant, and efficient drone operations, the Yangtze River Waterway Bureau has pursued a dual approach of standards-first and digital empowerment. Under the guidance of the Ministry of Transport's Water Transport Bureau, and with the bureau's professional technical staff as the core, the "Technical Guidelines for Low-Altitude Drone Waterway Inspection (Trial)" was compiled. Concurrently, more than 30 supporting regulations covering flight safety management, equipment maintenance, and archival documentation have been improved, establishing full-process standardization across "one drone, one file" equipment management, complete flight record retention, and operational review and optimization.
The digital management hub—the "Waterway Vision" platform—has been built and put into operation simultaneously. The platform centrally collects, stores, and manages drone inspection imagery and waterway operational outputs, achieving unified network management of all inspection data across the waterway and providing real-time digital support for precision maintenance and scientific dispatch. To date, the Shanghai, Yibin, and Chongqing waterway units have successfully obtained full-region, long-term routine flight permits, forming replicable and scalable demonstration models for airspace operations and raising the overall standard of compliant flight operations across the entire waterway.
Currently, the Yangtze River mainline spans multiple controlled and no-fly airspaces. Routine flight filing procedures are cumbersome, cross-jurisdictional and emergency flights lack fast-track approval channels, and the airspace coordination mechanism remains imperfect—these are the primary constraints on large-scale, routine drone deployment. The Yangtze River Waterway Bureau will focus on opening up compliant flight channels, replicating and promoting the mature experience of long-term airspace permits in the three pilot regions, establishing multi-party long-term coordination mechanisms, fully implementing annual flight whitelists and simplified batch filing models, and establishing a dedicated green channel for emergency rescue flights. This will minimize the filing burden on grassroots units while ensuring that routine inspections and emergency incident responses can launch immediately.
Upgrades to equipment and digital platforms are also accelerating in parallel. The Yangtze River Waterway Bureau will actively seek policy support to incorporate drone equipment, intelligent management platforms, AI recognition and early warning systems, and multi-source data fusion projects into the mid-to-long-term plan for smart waterway construction, addressing the gap in intelligent application R&D investment. It will continue to promote full coverage of grassroots drone deployment points across the entire waterway, gradually achieve spatial awareness coverage of key navigational segments of the Yangtze, and improve cross-unit data sharing and unified industry technical standards. This low-altitude intelligent inspection approach represents new quality productive forces that will support the digital and intelligent upgrading of the Yangtze River waterway and the high-quality construction of the "smooth, safe, intelligent, beautiful" modern Yangtze River waterway 2.0.
Going forward, the Yangtze River Waterway Bureau will continue to deepen low-altitude intelligent drone applications, continuously expand innovative operational scenarios, improve airspace coordination safeguards, and iteratively upgrade the smart management and control platform. Through technological strength, it aims to further reduce waterway maintenance costs, eliminate frontline operational safety hazards, and enhance mainline navigation support capabilities, driving the high-quality development of Yangtze River shipping.