In Russia, the volume of restoration and maintenance work of drainage reclamation systems has significantly decreased, the number of trained reclamation specialists has decreased, most of the objects need reconstruction, and the documentation and schemes of pipes and channels of drainage systems have been lost. Accordingly, the development of agricultural drainage reclamation will require large amounts of financial and labor costs. The aim of the work is to present an alternative approach to assessing the status of these systems for making management decisions using an unmanned aerial system (UAS), which allows you to quickly obtain high quality aerial photographs (2-7 cm/pixel) of an agricultural area up to 50 hectares in one flight. In addition to the unmanned aerial vehicle, the UAS also includes an onboard complex, a payload and a ground control station. The flight group carries out all stages of data acquisition and preprocessing in an automated mode using specialized software. In the course of the experimental studies, the main elements of the considered approach to monitoring drainage systems are highlighted: the period of aerial photography, determination of the pipes and canals schemes, determination of waterlogging zones on agricultural areas and breakdowns of a reclamation system, monitoring in dynamics. As a result, when solving the problem of monitoring drainage reclamation systems, the use of UAS seems to be a relevant and promising approach, which makes it possible to assess the object status promptly.