Massive IoT deployments in smart cities pose a significant challenge to the data collection due to the harsh wireless channel conditions of dense urban environments. Aerial reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) carried by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can improve the communication thanks to their high mobility that provides line-of-sight propagation. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the aerial RIS in the data collection by deriving the outage probability of the randomly deployed devices, while taking into account the imperfect channel state and the UAV fluctuations. Furthermore, we study the effects on the network reliability of two hybrid automatic repeat request protocol types, i.e., incremental redundancy and code combining, as well as on the average throughput. Finally, we provide useful insights regarding the RIS characteristics that guarantee the optimal network performance.