So the victim's first warning is when the air around it starts to thin drastically as the dragon magically casts a cone of vacuum in front of it, to speed its dive... I like it
Holy crap. These dragons are going to need some serious braking ability to pull a vacuum fed dive bomb. Well at least the victim would only be dead a second before they get eaten. Who knew dragons were such nice creatures to kill their victims prior to eating them. How humane indeed. Not to mention cuts out all that wriggling and screaming during the chewing, quite a annoying really.
Addendum (in a hurry to leave work last night!): Radar wasn't about seeing them, it was about detecting them in time to get the fighters high enough to intercept them. A Spitfire Mk VB had a rate of climb of 2,600 ft/min (this was with a 1,470 hp engine, the Mk I that fought the Battle of Britain had only 1,030 hp) so over five minutes to reach the same height as the Heinkel - and a fighter pilot would want more height so he could dive onto his target with a speed advantage (and because the escorting Me 109s would, using the same logic, also be higher than the bombers). So, 8 minutes to 20,000 ft. In that time, the bombers would cover nearly 30 miles; over a third of the way from Dover to London. That gives you less than quarter of an hour to down them before bombs on the capital, unless the radar puts you in position early by spotting them forming up over their airfields in Northern France. Back towards the OP: There are lots of references to dogfights being watched by people on the ground (and the Spitfire and Me109 were much closer in size to your dragon). And the radar was supplemented by the work of the Royal Observer Corps, who were situated on the ground and reported planes flying over. So, a big bird at 16,000 feet isn't beyond the human eye. ETA: As far as camouflage goes, once you're high enough up you're just a dark silhouette against a paler sky. And the barn owl has a white underside while it goes hunting in the dark; how's that for camouflage!
I was just thinking of a show on cryptids I saw a few years ago. The researchers constructed a bird-shaped kite, something like 20 or 30 foot wingspan, and ran it up a couple hundred feet in the park, then asked passersby to estimate its size and altitude. Don't remember specific details, but I do know nobody even came close to getting the right answer. Dragons might use the same strategy, if they were rare enough.
Were the people on the ground using binoculars? Him being a dark silhouette is good enough, as he really just doesn't want them to know it's a dragon in the sky.
1/ I imagine that the ROC would have been using binoculars. 2/ Reference @JLT 's hang-gliders: I've been walking near the Long Mynd, and seen the hang-gliders of the Midland Gliding club at a height between 500-800 feet higher than me, and about 5 miles away, and looking for all the world like a gaggle of dragons! 3/ "Dive-bombing" to catch prey/maximum speed: According to a National Geographic TV programme, the highest measured speed of a peregrine falcon is 389 km/h (242 mph). BUT... that's to hit a bird. The force with which it strikes will obviously do its prey no good at all, while the impact will take some of the falcon's speed off it, and then it will slow down more before it lands/hits the ground. Were it to hit the ground at anything like that speed, it would kill itself. For a falcon to "hit" something on the ground will do the attacker pretty much as much harm as the victim. The osprey, for instance, hunts by flying low across the sea/a lake and dangles its feet in the water when it spots a fish, the talons grip, and it then flies away with the target held in its feet. The gannet hunts by diving into the sea and hunting its prey underwater; to survive the impact with the surface, it dislocates its shoulders just before impact. Long story short, while your dragon may be able to reach a couple of hundred mph, it would have to reduce that significantly (and solely by aerodynamic means - no hitting the brake pedal!) before hitting its prey on the ground. 4/ How high could a dragon fly? Well, the Andean condor nests at 16,000 feet...
To be clear, I never suggesting that the dragon creates some sort of vacuum. I simply assume the ideal case for doing a differential equation to determine fall time.
I've never pictured him hitting the ground at hundreds of miles per hour. Mostly he just dive bombs really fast and then opens his wings like a parachute to slow down last minute. It might be unrealistic, but frankly I don't really care because it's fantasy and it looks cool in my head.
Striking another creature would only really work if you could do it without being seen. Falcons hit smaller birds like that from above, sharks hit seals like it from below, but it's not the only way to go. An eagle doesn't hit it's prey, it comes down on top of it and use it's superior strength and claws to kill it up close. To be an apex predator like an eagle, you also have to be pretty smart. They completely understand that if you drop a creature that can't fly, it'll die. Eagles actually hunt goats, which outweigh the eagles themselves. What they do is grab the goat near the edge of a cliff and use momentum to pull it over the edge. A dragon 60 feet would probably learn that trying to fight a human is dangerous because we have weapons and often other humans, but if it picks us up and drops us, there is very little risk. I imagine humans would work in shifts to patrol the skies. Our ancestors did that actually. Not all apes are social, evolutionary biologists believe that our ancestors learned to be social because we were hunted in the tops of the trees by birds.
Well, the eagles are smaller than the goats. A dragon that can lift a human would probably just crush its bones instead of picking one up and spending the energy taking flight simply to drop someone. Unless you mean the stupid set of humans who are climbing the side of a cliff like those goats. Although, if I was a dragon in that situation, I'd perch atop and drop debris on the humans instead of risking close quarters combat. Imagine flaming trees rolling down the mountain toward you!
It's pretty much all vertical, although the glider displayed more planform (in other words, you could see more of its wings) when it was directly above, so that helped as well. Seen at the same altitude, a glider is much harder to spot; I've had gliders at my level that were only a few hundred yards away that were hard to spot, because I was seeing them "edge on." I imagine a streamlined dragon would be similarly hard to spot.
Everybody knows dragons are masters of blending in. They walk amongst you. They might even be your neighbors...
