This paper presents a comprehensive guidance and control strategy for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) along energy optimal trajectories. An optimized flight path exploiting favorable wind fields provides significant energy savings. To maximize the energy savings, the UAV must remain close to the reference trajectory facing wind disturbances and uncertainty in the system dynamics. A look-ahead path following algorithm is implemented, which uses a nonlinear guidance law with inherent robustness against wind disturbance. This guidance law provides reference commands to specifically tailored inner-loop controllers. Classical loop shaping and robust mixed sensitivity 𝐻∞-techniques are used to design the individual control loops. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated for energy optimized trajectories.