Remember at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King when the Great Eagles, in beautiful deus ex machina-fashion, swoop in to aid our Middle Earth heroes during the Battle of the Black Gate? (Yes, I know my Nerd is showing.)
Well, it seems the Dutch have taken a cue from our favorite white wizard.
Except that instead of fighting off an aerial army of undead wraiths, the eagles are going to be taking down quadcopters, you know, in the event people continue to insist on misusing them.
The Dutch National Police has partnered with Guard From Above, a “raptor training company,” to determine whether eagles could serve as a kind of anti-drone weapons system. The birds are trained to identify an aircraft, snatch it out of the sky, and then fly away with the mechanical carrion.
Drone versus eagle. Predator versus, well, predator.
But why not just jam the drone’s radios or shoot the dang thing out of the sky? Using eagles prevents unmanned wreckage from falling out of the sky and endangering anyone. The Dutch National Police has also asked the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research to research any possible harm on the birds’ talons.
Preliminary eagle-versus-drone tests are set to last a few months, after which the Dutch Police will assess whether using the birds is an effective unmanned counter measure.
Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)