Hawk vs DJI FPV Drone

surprise attack

Hel­lo friends! Using the exam­ple of this case, which is not uncom­mon today, we decid­ed to give a few words about what else you need to pay atten­tion to before start­ing UAV pilot­ing. Accord­ing to the author of the video, this was the first day after buy­ing a DJI FPV quad, he decid­ed to try out FPV pilot­ing for the first time, where almost imme­di­ate­ly after take­off the drone was attacked by a hawk. As a result of the rapid attack, the bird and the drone were not injured.

First of all, I would like to note the beau­ty of the attack. The thing is that the hawk sur­pris­ing­ly turned out to be a pro­fes­sion­al in his field, show­ing demon­stra­tive accu­ra­cy in the attack. When view­ing the moment of the attack in slow motion (at 0:22 sec­onds), and we rec­om­mend that you do this, cou­pled with an addi­tion­al max­i­mum slow­down in the play­back speed through the set­tings of the YT play­er, you will see that, first­ly, the bird attacked the drone not from behind, but, so to speak, from the front to the face, sec­ond­ly, when attack­ing, the hawk deliv­ered a pow­er­ful push­ing blow under the bot­tom of the drone, there­by bypass­ing con­tact with sharp fast-mov­ing pro­pellers, per­form­ing spec­tac­u­lar aer­o­bat­ics for the sake of such a clever maneu­ver! We repeat, all the beau­ty of the attack is revealed pre­cise­ly at the very max­i­mum slow­down in video play­back.

Some analysis of the attack

Ana­lyz­ing the pro­fes­sion­al attack of a hawk, the fol­low­ing fac­tors can be dis­tin­guished: before attack­ing, the bird iden­ti­fied the tar­get as an inan­i­mate object, and also from which side it is bet­ter to approach it, rec­og­niz­ing the dan­ger zone of the work­ing pro­pellers. The fact that the drone was mis­tak­en for inan­i­mate is also indi­cat­ed by the out­come of the attack, the pur­pose of which was sim­ply to bring down the vio­la­tor of silence, but no more, because the hawk works with live prey exclu­sive­ly in a dif­fer­ent man­ner of hunt­ing.

Let’s summarize

Sum­ming up, I would like to make the fol­low­ing rec­om­men­da­tions. Before you start fly­ing a drone, always turn your eyes to the sky, watch the birds and their num­ber. Refuse to fly and change the place for the flight if you see their pre­vail­ing num­ber. It should be under­stood that birds, regard­less of their size, espe­cial­ly preda­to­ry species, as well as any oth­er wild ani­mals, have instincts, con­trolled ter­ri­to­ries, where the drone will always be an unex­pect­ed guest. With any con­tact with the drone, the bird will often receive seri­ous dam­age, which will even­tu­al­ly lead to an ago­niz­ing death. The sec­ond unpleas­ant out­come is the loss of the drone, since in most cas­es after a col­li­sion, the flight will go into an uncon­trolled fall with a sub­se­quent fatal out­come. And it’s fine if the drone just falls to the ground or, even bet­ter, catch­es on the crown of trees, but it can also fall on the head of an unsus­pect­ing per­son, and then the con­se­quences will only get worse.