11/23/2002: Bird strike

[Undertoad]

Via Gruntdoc's Blog comes a few very remarkable images of a "bird strike" event. He has a few other shots of this, at his site. The gent himself doesn't know exactly where the images originated, so I guess that's part of the fun.



Now that was a spicy meatball. Although the plane is on the ground - Gruntdoc says it's a T-44A Twin turboprop. So somebody must've landed that thing post-collision!

[Mav]

I dunno which I feel sorry for. The bird died but it also ripped the hell outta that wing, prolly made it hard to land.

Ouch, either way.

[Nothing But Net]

Duct tape ain't gonna fix that! Or is that duck tape?

[Nic Name]

www.ducktape.com

[helen]

That's what I'd call one tough bird.

[MaggieL]

That's not a wing, it's the horizontal stabilizer (in the tail) . The airplane was probably a little unstable in pich during landing, but it's overall lift wasn't seriously compromised.

I've seen bird strike damage too...never as severe as that because the airplanes I'm around don't go that fast. They also don't tend to bring the birds home still embedded in the airframe.

FAA and NASA have air cannon they use to shoot whole chickens at airframe parts to simulate bird strikes to leading edges and windshields. I understand they found out that using frozen chickens was a bad idea though.

[juju]

Are they live chickens? If so, i'd love to see a video of that.

[Nic Name]

Initial tests are done with subscale versions of the transparency at the University of Dayton Research Institute's impact physics lab. They fire gelatin-molded, artificial birds weighing four pounds apiece, out a compressed-air, 30-foot-barrel cannon, which can shoot at speeds up to 900 mph.

Three lasers and photodetectors measure the artificial chicken's velocity, while three cameras shoot the impact at 6,000 frames per second. Computers then create a 3-D, time-based deflection map of the strike and compare it to the computer simulation, which is usually very accurate.

After passing the institute's test, a validation trial is conducted at the Air Force Arnold Engineering Test Center, Tenn., using a real chicken. The Air Force buys commercial chickens, which are humanely destroyed before they're shot head-first, feathers and all, from the "rooster booster."

The whole messy story is here and here.

[Nic Name]

The frozen bird story, implicates the British.

Windshield Testing

The FAA has a device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. They point this thing at the windshield of the aircraft and shoot a dead chicken at about the speed the aircraft normally flies at it. If the windshield doesn't break, it's likely to survive a real collision with a bird during flight.

The British had recently built a new locomotive that could pull a train faster than any before it. They were not sure that its windshield was strong enough so they borrowed the testing device from the FAA, reset it to approximate the maximum speed of the locomotive, loaded in the dead chicken, and fired. The bird went through the windshield, broke the engineer's chair, and made a major dent in the back wall of the engine cab.

They were quite surprised with this result, so they asked the FAA to check the test to see if everything was done correctly. The FAA checked everything and suggested that they might want to repeat the test using a thawed chicken.

It might be a joke. http://www.snopes.com/science/cannon.htm

[MaggieL]

Damn...Snopes kills another good story. Well spotted, Nic.

[Griff]

So what kind of bird was it? From his feet, I'm guessing a turkey buzzard or similar bird.

[Nic Name]

Griff is an ornithologist.

The Turkey Vulture is one of North America's largest birds of prey. It reaches a length of 32 inches with a wing span of 6 feet. Its overall color is brown-black with a featherless, red head, white bill and yellow feet among mature adults. Immature birds have a darker face. Although usually silent, the bird will occasionally emit a soft hiss or groan.

[Nic Name]

If Androx is still a member, he'll be interested to learn that I get most of my news from Pravda.

The rest of you "merkins" might have missed this story, which was suppressed by the White House in the wake of 9/11.

10:52 2001-11-22

AN AMERICAN KILLED BY KAMIKAZE DUCK

A Florida man died after a duck hit him in the head, knocking him off a personal watercraft and into a lake. The victim, Leon Resnick, 31, and his friend worked at a company that sold personalized watercraft. Mr. Resnick was driving the watercraft at a lake in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Deerfield Beach on Thursday, while a friend watched from shore. The friend turned to get a radar gun to check the vessel's speed, then noticed Mr. Resnick was missing from the craft. He found him several minutes later in the water, pulled him ashore and attempted to revive him, the sheriff's office is quoted by Reuters as saying.

Investigators believe the victim was knocked from the personal watercraft by a duck, which struck Mr. Resnick in the face as he sped the watercraft along the lake. Mr. Resnick was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as blunt trauma to the head and drowning.

The duck's carcass was later recovered and turned over to investigators. Mr. Resnick is believed to have been travelling about 55 mph (over 80km) when the accident occurred.

Read the original in Russian: http://lenta.ru/oddly/2001/11/21/duck/

Conspiracy theorists like Cairo will be able to let us know if there is a potential terrorist connection here. I mean, it can't be coincidental that the 9/11 terrorists trained in Florida and this Kamikaze Duck was in Florida. Is there a Japanese connection? A Chinese connection: was it a Peking Duck? Let's connect the dots!

Where was that plane when it was hit by the turkey buzzard?

Let's form a committee.

The duck's name? Donald Padilla.

Coincidence? I think not.

[Nic Name]

Originally requested by juju

Are they live chickens? If so, i'd love to see a video of that.

Your request is in the queue. We're workin' on it.

In the meantime, you might enjoy the movie: Testing and Analysis of Bird Strike Impact Response. Also included are email addresses for the engineers in charge of this program, so you might want to enquire of them whether they have a video testing live chickens.