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In this paper, a fractional nonlinear control strategy based on the nested saturations technique and the Caputo-Fabrizio derivative for a quadrotor aircraft, to maintain desired position and orientation in stationary flight and trajectory tracking tasks, is proposed and developed. In addition, the dynamic model is obtained by using the Euler–Lagrange formulation, and then it is generalized to an arbitrary order through the Caputo-Fabrizio derivative. The traditional nonlinear control based on the nested saturation technique is also developed and implemented on the quadrotor for comparison purposes between both control schemes. Numerical simulations demonstrated the superiority of the proposed control strategy for stabilizing the quadrotor at hover and reaching the desired position and orientation, over its integer-order counterpart. In addition, three additional desired trajectories are considered, keeping the same gains and orders, to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed control scheme under different operating conditions. In this sense, our controller presents significant performance improvements, which were validated through system simulations. Our proposed control system and its traditional counterpart were tuned experimentally using the response of the system to a desired trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]