Abstract. The article deals with one of the important areas of application of uavs – thermal control of violations of hydro-insulation coating of heating mains. Mapping of the territory with heating mains in settlements can be performed by uav in automatic (overflight of the territory according to the set programme) or automated (UAV operator manually changes uav flight modes) modes. Such mapping or thermography in the specified modes is much more effective than the methods of heat pipelines bypassing by the control teams used nowadays. An approach for obtaining optimal trajectories of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during the formation of thermographic maps is proposed.
at the end of the paper it is noted that the estimation of the length of the uav motion trajectory and, consequently, of the flight time is given for the case of precise motion along a given trajectory without taking into account the influence of external factors: side wind, headwind, upward and downward air currents. It is possible to estimate the length of the perturbed trajectory for different permissible wind load using simulation modelling.

Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), ultralight unmanned aerial vehicle, thermographic maps, thermal imager, hazardous industrial facilities, heat network pipelines.