wow, that’s a very cool use case! 
@joe, our device networking expert is also working with drones these days, I’m sure he’d have some thoughts on this 
For reference, host OS 1.x series are using Connman, while the upcoming 2.x series switched to NetworkManager, which is more flexible. Here’s a project, called resin-wifi-connect, and while its aim is different, the code shows some examples of how to manipulate network connections from the container (both from Connman and NetworkManager). Need to take some care setting up networking code, as, as this way if your device loses network connection, you might not be able recover it. If you have physical access to the device, you can always just reflash, though.
Looking at the docs of NetworkManager.conf, there should be settings to set up with specific wireless interface (by name or by mac), and then you don’t need any of the coding mentioned above, just properly prepared config file dropped on the SD card on the /resin-boot partition’s /system-connections directory. If you want to try out these, the beta releases of 2.x series are available at the staging website (which is our testing ground, first to get new stuff, but not guaranteed to work, just for testing) at https://dashboard.resinstaging.io .
Will try it out next week as well, should be an interesting example! And the GoPro control is super interesting, just found python-goprohero by searching around based on your description. 
That’s not really the way forward, unfortunately, this FAQ should give some explanation: Why can’t I SSH into or run code in the HostOS?