First time lesson in combat. I'll try to get photo on my page soon but I was flying my homemade micro ultimate and a hawk grabbed it out of the sky and ripped the tail off

just posted image in gallery it should be one of the first images

Our field is full of vultures but they dont seem to want to engage.

It's amazing how agile they are in flight.

If you don't understand why fighter pilots are concerned with being turned inside of.....get on the tail of a hawk....he turned right, I turned right...he turned so sharp on his next right that he was on my six....I dove he dove.......I got too close to the ground for his comfort...he broke it off to the left....I landed......

If you harass a bird of prey at our field, you will be told to land and asked to leave.

You would be arrested if caught in the same situation again.

It's no fluke that our flying field is Hawk Field, although we've had plenty of turkeys and deer around this year as well. I haven't had an airplane attacked yet, but they do get looked at from time to time.

The hawks are quite handy if you're flying a glider; they seem to know where all of the best thermals are.

O.F.C.S........

Just for information.....I wasnt harasing the bird.  Didn't even know it was there.  Threw the plain, did a roll and a loop and then this black shadow confused me and wack.  It took about ten seconds to realize what happend.

just dont harass a Bald Eagle and you wont have anything to worry about

How many guys in the history of mankind do you figure have been thrown in prison for harassing a bird of prey with a model airplane?
Or even just arrested, for that matter?

We had a local arrested for flying a kit at night with LED strips. Police got calls about a certain UFO...

[link=http://www.twincities.com/ci_16086442]St Paul man arrested for flying an LED-equipped kite at night.[/link]

United States Code Title 16, Chapter 7, Subchapter II, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918

The statute makes it unlawful to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill or sell birds listed therein ("migratory birds").

over 800 species covered under the treaty

No matter how good a flyer you think you are, you will never be good enough to pursue a hawk.
To think that you can do so with a model airplane simply shows how little time you've spent in the same airspace with these birds.
These birds are completely in charge of EVERYTHING up there.

What CP said.
Any way you look at it going after a bird can cause bad PR. We just don't need it.
A flock of white pelicans floated by our field one fine spring day. Around 70 birds in a group, not well formed like gease, in a thermal as no wing flappig was observed. They just wheeled in and around each other drifting north. Very good looking black and white birds. One flyer started to head for them and was booed by the other flyers, he aborted pretty quickly.
It is great fun to fly with buzzards and hawks. It seems hawks, especially in nesting season, are a bit territorial. I have read here the best way to evade an agressive hawk is to do loops.
I think this works because it make us look silly and the hawks start to feel sorry for us.

Big groups of geese are the ones I worry about hitting when 100 of them figure it's time to rise up out of the tall grass.
Years ago a friend was flying a big .60 sized pattern plane and either a hawk or eagle grabbed it by a wingtip and shook it, leaving claw marks in the balsa/foam.

One of our clubmembers has an electric powered buzzard. From 20 feet it looks just like the real thing except for the motor in the pod mounted above the wings like a float plane. The Buzzards are always kind of curious when the planes are in the air staying in the periphry of the pattern, but when this thing goes up and starts circling the field they come from miles around. Sometimes there will be 10 or more circling around with him. I guess they think he has spotted something that is dying and is waiting untill he can eat it.

Once we start putting other planes back up in the air they get annoyed pretty quickly and move on. I would think it would be near impossible to actually chase down a bird in the air. Although it does initially seem like a harmless fun idea to chase a raptor of some type with an RC plane, I agree it is probably not a great idea.

most migratory birds arent bird of prey.... well at least not the hawks and buzzards, at our flying field

I knew a guy who was actually tried and convicted in another country for chasing migratory birds with his RC plane. It was horrible! Life in the prison was unbearably brutal, and the American embassy there basically ignored his family's pleas to intervene...

Oh wait, I didn't know the guy, I was thinking of the movie "Midnight Express" and the guy was arrested for smuggling hash instead of chasing birds with an RC airplane...

...never mind!

I think the hawks and the vultures are safe, I can assure you that even the slowest buzzard can out manuever any RC plane. But I love watching people's knee jerk reactions to their perception of other's actions
The TWRA has been very successful around here at "re-introducing" wild life and improving deer populations. Now we have so many hawks and coyotes around here that you very seldom see a rabbit anymore, quail are practically non-existent, red and grey fox are a very rare sight anymore, and you can't drive down any road or city steet at night without a real good chance of hitting deer.
Twenty years ago things weren't this way. There were deer, a few hawks, and the occasional coyote, but nothing like we have today. When I was a boy, you couldn't walk a fence or a tree line for more than 200 yards without scaring up a rabbit or a covey of quail, but not today. They're just not around because they've got too many predators now.
If it were possible to take out a hawk or coyote with one of my planes, I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to remove a few. I'd prefer to have a few less of them and a few more rabbits and quail. Of course, if I did this, it would be at the privacy of my own property and not at my flying club field, and I probably wouldn't brag about it here on RCU.!

Around here, you don't fool with the birds. We were shut down for 6 weeks to allow some Northern Harrier chicks to fledge and about 20% of our field is closed to flying from March-Sept. because of nesting Osprey. It's not a great situation but we're forced to live with it. And local Park Rangers are armed. And yes, we did have one member fined and receive a suspended sentence for harassing wildlife a number of years back.

The birds really don't seem to mind our presence and routinely fly back and forth right over our runway carrying nesting materials and fish back from a local lake. But we take them seriously. Not because of the enforced local regulations but just out of respect for their space.

We did have an American White Pelican attack one of our planes while it was floating on our lake waiting for 'rescue'. The moral of that story get your carb set right!

ofcs

What does OFCS mean? I googled it but got nothing.