Abstract
The employment of drones in extremely harsh environmental conditions is the main challenge of flight operations in the Alpine scenario. Characterizing the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) performance in a controlled simulated environment is crucial to defining the atmospheric condition limits for safe operations. Following the experiments performed previously in the same project, we performed a series of tests at different simulated altitudes (from ground level up to 9000 m) and with different payloads (from 0 kg up to 4 kg) assessing the efficiency of the drones. The test campaign performed in a simulated standard Alpine mountain context led to define the boundaries for planning a safe flight in a such harsh and challenging environment.