  Drones have become increasingly popular in a variety of fields, including
agriculture, emergency response, and package delivery. However, most drone
operations are currently limited to within Visual Line of Sight (vlos) due to
safety concerns. Flying drones Beyond Visual Line of Sight (bvlos) presents new
challenges and opportunities, but also requires new technologies and regulatory
frameworks, not yet implemented, to ensure that the drone is constantly under
the control of a remote operator. In this preliminary study, we assume to
remotely control the drone using the available ground cellular network
infrastructure. We propose to plan bvlos drone operations using a novel
multi-layer framework that includes many layers of constraints that closely
resemble real-world scenarios and challenges. These layers include information
such as the potential ground risk in the event of a drone failure, the
available ground cellular network infrastructure, and the presence of ground
obstacles. From the multi-layer framework, a graph is constructed whose edges
are weighted with a dependability score that takes into account the information
of the multi-layer framework. Then, the planning of bvlos drone missions is
equivalent to solving the Maximum Path Dependability Problem on the constructed
graph, which turns out to be solvable by applying Dijkstra's algorithm.
