Ok, Gandalf could not have just gotten the Eagles to fly over Mt Doom and drop the Ring in.
First- only a very few could let go of the Ring.
Next- you have the Will and Eye of Sauron, and once focused on you, you stop and cower. Maybe Gandalf might resist it, but…
The Nazgul. 'nuff said.
They don’t have to drop the Ring, they just have to drop Frodo.
I can’t drop it for you. But I can drop you!
That Cracked article infuriated me, too. 
Seriously, I thought the whole idea was that the “Free Peoples” had to fight for their own future (to free themselves from the threat of Sauron’s influences). For whatever divine reason, the Maia or near-Maia were not to do the heavy lifting for them.
I assumed that the Eagles were seen as the agents of Manwe, so they couldn’t help in any overt way.
A catapult, however…
/wins thread. 
You come in real low, with the mountain between Dol…whatever, then bommmmmmbs awayyyyy.
By the way…I think the Istari and free races sort of cheated. You can get your shit together enough to win a couple of lucky battles and distract Sauron / keep him bottled up and then destroy his ring, but you guys can’t get it together enough to actually defeat him by force? I’m not sure they passed the test there.
Yes. A pre-electronic–hell, pre-Industrial-Revolution–culture is surely going to be able to conceive, design, and build a catapult capable of propelling an object smaller than a human finger over hundreds of miles into a target only a few dozen yards wide,
This has been discussed many many times on LOTR boards. The eagles aren’t temporal beings at all. They are servants of Manwe (read: God), and as such only appear when he wants them to. It’s very like saying, well, angels could have flown the ring to Mt. Doom and saved everyone a lot of trouble. Tolkien was Catholic and saw Middle Earth as a field upon which mortals worked out their destinies. Personally, I think the eagles rescue Frodo and Sam only because they have proven themselves worthy to be rescued.
Frodo used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16 back home, they’re not much bigger than a dozen yards wide.
Manwe is not God. There is a creator God in the LotR verse, and his name is Eru Iluvatar. Manwe is Eru’s chief servant, or rather the chief of God’s servants, or rather the chief of God’s chief’s servants. He is the chief of the Valar, the angelic beings who entered the corporeal world to fulfill its design. Think of Manwe as Michael, or Metatron, or the foreman.
Mount Doom is heat shielded, so you have to use proton eagles.
I’ve never seen the first Star Wars all the way through. Therefore, by Rhymer Rule 96, it does not exist.
<…smiles blandly, having nuked his Cracked .com links many weeks ago…>
I always thought of it the opposite way: Middle Earth Eagles are just really big, talking, birds. And mere animals, even jumbo-sized ones, aren’t really much of a match for deathless human sorcers infused with the power of an evil demigod. Or the demigod himself, for that matter.
Once the Nazgul Combat Air Patrol was diverted to emergency ground-attack mode, and other anti-air defenses of Mordor were distracted before the entire command and control system was eliminated, then the Eagles could pull off a search and rescue mission. But before then, even covert infiltration would have met with failure.
And the only sentient mechanically competent enough to have designed such an engine was playing for the other team. (Or his own team, depending on how much you believe his stated intent.)
Obviously it would need some sort of guidance system…
Ah… you deliberately choose not to see it all the way through in order to have your way, right?
Kinda like “I never read that brief, Senator.”
Besides, it is well known that the airspeed of a NON coconut laden hobbit is pretty high.