Flying wing cruises a mountain valley, gets grabbed by a red kite

Oct 30, 2026 Last reply: 2 days ago 2 Replies
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The whole idea here is simple and appealing: a flying wing with a camera on board, out to capture aerial footage over a mountainous valley with autumn forests, rocky ridges and cloudy skies. That is exactly the kind of cruise flight most of us dream about, and for the first stretch of the clip it looks like it is going perfectly.



Then nature intervenes. Around twelve seconds in, the craft banks toward the tree-covered slope, and between 00:14 and 00:26 a large bird of prey attacks and grapples with it, apparently trying to carry the whole thing away. The raptor has yellow talons and brown and white plumage, and the footage of the struggle is genuinely gripping. It finally disengages around 00:27, probably because the resistance felt too much, and the maker reckons the bird is probably fine afterwards.



What stands out to me is how the maker handled it: they switched to angle mode the moment the bird grabbed the craft, which is their quick way to recover from a stall. Also worth noting is that the props are not sharp or rigid enough to hurt the bird, and only a few beak and claw marks show on the wing. That seems like a sensible setup for wildlife encounters, in my view.



The open question is the ending: the maker had not swapped back to acro mode, which is why the video finishes shaky, and the footage carries no readable telemetry overlay, so the exact components stay unidentified.


The angle mode switch is the smartest part of this whole episode for me. When a raptor has hold of your wing, fine acro control is the last thing on your mind, and having a recovery mode ready as a panic button seems like a very deliberate piece of airmanship. The trade-off is the shaky ending, since acro was never switched back, but I would take a wobbly landing over a lost wing every time.

One concrete improvement: add a telemetry overlay to the feed. Since the footage has no readable on-screen data, nobody can tell altitude, speed or battery state during the struggle, and a grab like that at 00:14 to 00:26 would be fascinating to analyse with numbers attached. It would also help confirm how stable the flight really was after the bird let go around 00:27.

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