One beautiful summer morning my friend (Coyote Ugly) in his then Taylorcraft and I in my Interstate were flying wing and wing, just out enjoying life, what could be better? Two guys, two planes, just sharing a great time.
We were about fifty feet up and headed down a long fence line when I see a Golden Eagle sitting on a fence post, and as we approached he took flight. And just when I though it couldn't get any better, he started flying along with us. Sooo cool!!! Then for some obscure reason unknownst to me, he (the eagle) decided to perform a "time to climb" right into my left wing. Now for all you pilots that have never had a mid-air, there are things that make a sonic boom besides jets, like your sphincter muscle slamming shut.
I used frantic hand signals to get my friend to move over to my left wing to check if there was any damage, you should have seen the LOOK on his face. He made this big circle with his arms, yeah, you guessed it, there went the sphincter again!
Upon arriving back at the airport we discovered a hole a little bit bigger than a basket ball between the last two ribs.
So the moral to this story is no matter how cool it is to fly with eagles, you could end up pulling twelve pounds of vacuum where your butt meets the seat.

Great first post! Welcome to BCP.

Hi y4,

Amazing you posted this at the exact same time I was writing an old friend I haven't seen for 30 years about my experience:

I went through a series of sailplanes first, but it was the very first (a 1-34) that I hit the eagle with. I hadn't even finished my license yet (1970), and I wouldn't be here if Schweizer hadn't built their gliders like a brick shithouse. I was at about 14,000 feet over Colorado Springs when I saw an eagle below me going in the opposite direction. I thought how cool is this and so I dove on his tail and planned to go about 50 feet under him to get a real close-up look. I was going about 120 knots and just as I got under him he looked under his left wing at me, folded his right wing, flipped upside down in a heartbeat, folded his other wing and dropped straight into me. He missed my canopy by about a foot and impacted the right wing about a foot out, collapsing most of a four foot section of the leading edge almost back to the main spar. It sounded like a 40mm shell exploding, and the plane started shaking like a wet puppy. I pulled up immediately and it stopped, but the drag meant I was coming down much faster than normal. I couldn't see the worst of the damage and anyway I didn't have a chute, so luckily I was close enough to the airfield to make it back and make a more or less normal landing. Then I got out and just about fainted...blood and guts and feathers right inside the wing where it had been crushed and torn. Later I learned that this is the classic raptor evasive manoeuver, and that the one thing you never want to do is fly right under a bird. If he had hit a foot to the left he would have come through the canopy and pretty much decapitated me. There went the first of my nine lives. Later on, I got the chance to actually soar with an eagle in formation about ten feet off my wing for several minutes, since I had learned to approach very slowly in stages, waiting for him to get used to the idea. THAT will remain one of the highlights of my life! God, I wish I had had a camera with me.

So now I know you shouldn't fly ABOVE an eagle either! Glad we both lived to tell.

Rocky

Yea, what Y4 says is true, but he left out a few little items too... Like the fact that he had a total of about 6 hours of flying time, altogether, and that this happened during probably his 1st or 2nd hour of solo flying.  Another thing, the Interstate he was flying, really was a POS to put it mildly, NO instruments, you could see through the floorboards better than the windshield, the whole plane was absolutely worn out several years ago.  We were both probably nuts for flying the damn thing.

I wasn't a flight instructor either, just kind of showed him what the pedals did, how the stick worked, how to listen for airspeed, as there were no instruments, and rode around in the back while he figured out how to takeoff and land, then turned him loose, after about 3 hours of "flight training"...  Guess that also said something about what a good plane the Interstate was too, but probably more about the size of his kahonies..

Wish I was around back in the good ol' days. All the good stories i hear are from back when...

Talk to a guy the other day that told me a good one. He had a cub, didn't say what kind, and wanted to try skydiving. He couldn't fit inside white the chute on so he sat on the strut while his buddy flew. He sat on the side away from the tower so the controller couldn't see him while they took off. When they got some alt he just let go

whee wrote:Wish I was around back in the good ol' days. All the good stories i hear are from back when...

These stories blend real well with the "Instruction vs. Gas" thread...

Way more Darwinian world back in the day. Weak got culled out, and the smart and big balled ones did some amazing things. I'm real glad I started flying then instead of now (Of course now I can't find my damn airplane keys most days, so I'd never get anything done in the air if'n I was taking lessons).

Gump

Saw a T-shirt the other day that said it all... "The Older I get, The better I was."

The only thing I see that's different about nowadays is that people share their questionable exploits on the internet, and then get spanked after the fact.

Keep your mouth shut and enjoy your shenanigans in quiet satisfaction, and nowadays can be just as good as the old days.

That's why some of us live in the wilds of Nee Vad Uh...

It's a dang fun place to be.

Gump