Guess Google Loon is better suited for this as it can stay longer in place? 5 hours sounds extremely limited given the effort to get there in the first place.
An UAV's advantage is that it can fly on its own and fly a long distance (Wing Loong's flight time is said to be 30 hours). Given enough drones they can deploy a continuous mobile network across a large area.
One good alternative I can think of is deploying small self-contained mesh networking devices, something like Project Owl, directly from air. These devices can form an emergency network for communicating urgent needs.
They're tethered.