Aerial battle between $950 government drone and bald eagle ends with drone sinking to the bottom of Lake Michigan

A government drone was mapping shoreline erosion near Michigan's Upper Peninsula on July 21. The quadcopter, which belonged to Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, was disabled after seven minutes in flight and at an altitude of 162-feet because of a devastating airstrike by a bald eagle. Hunter King, one of the department's drone pilots, received warnings that the $950 Phantom 4 Pro Advanced drone was losing altitude fast, approximately plummeting at 30 feet per second. Another alert came in that notified the pilot that one of the propellers had detached while it had been flying at 22 mph. "I was looking through the camera on the drone with my iPad, and it just went into a spiral," King told NPR. "It was like a really bad roller coaster ride." King looked up into the air to see what went wrong and he spotted a suspicious bald eagle flying away. The next thing King knows is that the EGLE has landed. Unfortunately, the drone landed somewhere in Lake Michigan and sank to the bottom. Data indicated that the drone crash-landed in 4 feet of water about 150 feet offshore. A one-man search party by EGLE Unmanned Aircraft Systems coordinator Arthur Ostaszewski in a kayak was fruitless. "The attack could have been a territorial squabble with the electronic foe, or just a hungry eagle," the department said in a press release...MORE