One late fall night at 4,500 feet I hit a bird. At the time I had no idea for sure what happened. I had left Sheboygan, WI and settled in for a nice smooth 1.5 hour late night flight back home. As I crossed over Lake Winnebago there was a horrendous thud and the entire Cessna 150 shuddered. I checked the instruments but they were fine. The engine was purring along normally and a quick check of the controls showed that they were all responding well. I grabbed my mini-Mag Light, ripped off the red lens and started scanning what I could see of the outside of the plane. I couldn't see any damage to the airplane at all.

With another few minutes before I would be over land my mind started to piece together the puzzle. I figured I must have hit a bird. Since I couldn't see any damage it either hit the tail or the landing gear. Since the elevators and rudder were responding very well and the plane was still flying hands off I assumed that if it hit the tail, the damage had to be minimal of the plane would be pitching one way or the other. That left me with one sinking thought. Something had hit the landing gear and the only way I would know for sure if there was damage was when I landed the plane. By the time I reached the edge of Lake Winnebago I had decided that my best course of action was to fly on to my destination and land verrrry carefully. If something did go wrong, at least I would be at my home airport and be able to handle it better.

I can't begin to tell you all of the thoughts that a guy thinks after an hour of flying wondering if the landing gear is going to work. Yet an hour later I was on a long final and about to find out. There were slight cross winds but that helped my plan. I dropped in all 40 degrees of flaps and came in slow. I eased in some power and touched the up wind gear down and rolled on it for a while. It seemed to hold so I set the other gear down, ready with the rudder and the throttle. Nothing happened. As the speed bled off, the nose came down and again nothing happened. The 150 settled to a gentle roll as if nothing at all had happened!

When I finally rolled to a stop and got a chance to inspect the plane I found what had happened. The bird had hit the plane at the intersection of the wing and the strut. The bird must have been split in two or bounced off. There were feathers and guts crammed in the gap between the wing and the strut but there was very little blood. I couldn't see the evidence from the cabin, but it was obvious.

The moral of the story. I dunno. Clean living and dumb luck helps sometimes.

When I was a kid in my Cessna 140, (way back in nineteen ought 64 or so) used to chase crows and ravens all the time, trying to see if I could get one with the prop. You couldn't get any closer than maybe 40-50 feet, and they would just roll over, fold up their wings and dive. Kinda fun tho, making those machine gun sounds, yankin, bankin and trying to get a "kill". Sounds like a good thing I never tried an eagle...

Joe

I believe you are still a kid, just traded the 140 in on a Super Cub. Don't ever grow up.

Gary

Coyote Ugly wrote:When I was a kid in my Cessna 140, (way back in nineteen ought 64 or so) used to chase crows and ravens all the time, trying to see if I could get one with the prop. You couldn't get any closer than maybe 40-50 feet, and they would just roll over, fold up their wings and dive. Kinda fun tho, making those machine gun sounds, yankin, bankin and trying to get a "kill". Sounds like a good thing I never tried an eagle...

Hey Joe! Where's them video's??

Haven't hit one but if you come into Juneau from the North or West in low cover you will have to come through what they call the cut, it ain't bad except that sometimes there may be up to twenty bald eagles flying in circles within the cut. They don't talk on the radio and they don't have nav lights either. They always seem to fold one wing over and dive under you but they can flat scare the shit out of you while they do it.

I have heard of people chasing eagles with remote control planes and the eagles seem to think it is fun, they will just laze along until a plane gets close then either do the wing over or a sort of cobra move where they roll up and back really sharp and extend their talons. Lots of fun but I have never heard of anyone even coming very close to hitting one.

That don't mean you won't find a myopic iggle or just run out of luck and they would sure make a mess

Interesting article on Wired.com:

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2009/04/faa-bird-strike.html

Just a couple months ago I was preflighting and noticed something adhering to the prop: it was a bit of red goo and some feathers. I don't remember hitting anything and there was no other damage

At the Planes of Fame Warbirds airshow a couple of years ago the Turkey Vultures were soaring on the thermals around the airport as the day cleared.

I am not sure who won the B17 vs Vulture contest but I am guessing the Vulture did not fly again.

I was watching round #3 of the Red Bull Air Races on Hulu today and caught this:

Hannes Arch trades paint with a Pelican.


Unfortunately the pelican had no paint to trade and exploded into a feather and meat mist.


Lucky guy.

I had a pretty good strike once. I was in a flight of 3, and was on the left wing. Naturally, I was staring at lead, and saw a brown flash. Very shortly thereafter there was a loud thud. I never really saw it, or had time to react.

Dunno if this counts as a birdstrike, but it involves a bird and a plane. Around March, we were taxiing our C-17 to the AMC ramp at Baghdad International, and about 20 pigeons started flying along with the front of the plane. It reminded me of seeing pictures of dolphins jump around the front of a ship. One of the pigeons decided he had enough and made a right turn, and made it about four feet before he got sucked right into the #3 engine. No problems with the engine, we just kept on going and wrote it up.

I recall those blood and guts. I remember a few close ones over the Duck Flats back in the day.

DonC wrote:Have hit and had my pilots hit lots of ducks in the takeoff canal during take off on Lake Hood in ANC Usually hit the prop with no problems besides cleaning blood and guts off the plane on return. have dented wing a few times and filed suit against the airport and they settled and repaired no questions asked

I was shooting some landings on a river gravel bar the other day, and first had to make a few overhead passes to get the pelicans out of the way. Kind of like shooing cattle out of a hayfield. This area is thick with pelicans the last few years, and they (Fish and Game, not sure..) are taking steps to cut down their number. Their presence, along with other waterfowl, is a major factor to consider for anyone choosing to gravel bar land or even low fly the rivers and lakes.

Yet another bird strike video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm5PaXDBPT4

Have hit several with the airlines but most go through the bypass section of the jet engine.

If they go through the core your problems escalate as the video below shows.

http://youtu.be/9KhZwsYtNDE

I hit something big, prolly an eagle going into Port Graham one time, it bent the leading edge of the left flap so bad it would not retract. In fact the noise the flap made trying to retract was my first indication something happened. I never felt or heard anything, no blood or feathers either.

Close calls happen all the time, especially at Nanwalek when the salmon carcasses are at the mouth of the river which is the end of the runway and the seagulls are there in the high hundreds, or on windy days when the eagles are up high playing.

Ever since that birdstrike I changed my sunglasses to ESS Ballistic safety glasses (http://www.esseyepro.com/Ballistic-Sung ... egory.html). They give me a sense of protection and still look good.....can't be a cool guy without the cool guys.

Way back n the 50's during the Panamerican Road races, Mercedes Benz had troubles with birds smashing into race car windshields. Buzzards feasting on road kill could not take off quickly enough and would smash into the windshield of a rapidly approaching Mercedes.

The German solution was to install "BuzzardBars"

http://www.mbca.org/panamericana-gullwing-and-sls

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/218565388139425674/

For an EAB with all sorts of firewall reinforcement tubing running down the inside of the windshield, what's a few more bars eh ...plus hey..if you can't see...just go to synthetic vision on your glass panel.

hicountry wrote:I am always aware of hawks. They don't seem to move when you approach. I have had to dodge them, they just look at you like " I was there first". Getting close to geese, they have lways dove down out of the way.
HC

I have had a few close calls with Hawks and large Seagulls ("Black-backs") high in the Southern Alps. They seem to see and avoid me better than I them. Hawks tend to soar up, gulls to turn or dive; from my few experiences.

For those that know my history with ducks....i just want to say i hate F#$!#@g Birds!

I've been pretty fortunate, I guess, with only 2 major bird encounters in 41 years. Although we have beau coup Canada geese around here, I've never had even a close encounter with any of them (knock on wood).

The first bird event was not a collision, but is the most memorable. I was on my student long XC solo in early January 1973, returning to Anchorage from Homer, putzying along in the 150 at maybe 85 or 90 mph. I glanced back to the left, and a small flock of Canada geese were pumping hard, trying to form up on the 150. I slowed down some more, and with a lot of effort, they kept up for a short time. Nothing I can find says that they can fly that fast, but I know that for that short time, maybe only a couple or three minutes, they did exactly that.

The other event was a very loud bang while flying a 73 Skylane about 38 years ago, which shuddered the whole airplane for a second. Upon landing, I discovered a large dent in the fairing of the left tubular landing gear, plus some mallard feathers caught in the junction between the horizontal stabilizer and the empennage, plus a bunch of blood splatters on the gear leg and the left side of the empennage and horizontal tail. There were no dents other than on the gear leg fairing. I think the duck was just about obliterated by the landing gear leg (thought you'd like that, PP).

Cary