Recent advancements in drone technology have significantly broadened their applications in logistics, humanitarian relief, and infrastructure inspection. In this talk, I will present our recent research on optimizing drone operations across these diverse scenarios. Specifically, I will discuss methods for optimizing drone delivery routing under nonlinear energy consumption and uncertain weather conditions, leveraging truck–drone delivery systems to exploit their complementary strengths, allocating drones for emergency delivery under different priority levels, and designing drone inspection routing supported by automated battery swapping stations. Beyond these methodological contributions, I will also highlight how the characteristics of different application scenarios shape the modeling assumptions, optimization approaches, and managerial insights.