Hey, if you were going to get rid of commercial drones, how would you do it? If you said ‘eagles’ then you’re either Dutch or you’re probably Gandalf the Grey. We’re not sure which is more awesome.
A video (above) is doing the rounds claiming to show the Dutch police service, working with a company called Guard From Above, training eagles to capture drones in mid-flight. It makes sense, right? Eagles are used to snatching fast-moving targets out of the sky and there isn’t a drone pilot alive who will get his craft away from one of these predators in time if it really wanted to take down his flying bit of plastic.
Our main concern is the potential damage sustained by the eagle itself from the exposed propellers in this video. There’s no sign of the eagle being injured – instead it seems reluctant to give up its prey – but that doesn’t mean that there might not be sudden injuries or long-term effects for the raptor drone-captor.
Our Dutch is so rusty that it’s non-existent so the guys in the video above could be talking about how they’re going to train up an eagle army to steal all of Amazon’s airborne deliveries and we wouldn’t know. Seriously though, if they’re saying anything like that then tell us in the comments. Please.
Since trusty old Google Translate says that the title of the video above is “Police set raptors to get hostile drones from the sky”, we’re going to take it seriously for the moment. Because there’s something satisfying about knowing that falconry as a hobby might make a comeback just so we can scoop illegal drones out of the sky. But whether this will become an actual thing is unclear for the moment. How practical is it to train up eagles when you can go drone-hunting with your own drone, after all? If there were an award for ‘Coolest Idea’, though…
Source: via Buzzfeed