This paper designs an energy-quality multilevel framework for the coding and transmission of aerial images, and then introduces a scaling-based intra encoder with flexible sampling factor (SF) and quantization parameter (QP). By experimentally investigating how different coding configurations affect the complexity-rate-quality characteristics of aerial images, this paper derives a configuration estimation model between energy-quality level and appropriate (SF, QP) configuration. By utilizing the model, a bivariate control scheme is proposed so as to progressively adjust sender's energy consumption under quality constraints. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve better energy-quality tradeoff with a wider quality range, and reduce the energy consumption above a certain quality.