Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler I have new faith in water landings

Your right that there isn’t any material available to make a screen that could withstand a birdstrike and still let sufficient air into the engine for efficient operation and as you suggest the screen would only add to the damage.

We average a couple of birdstikes each month (seasonally variable based on bird populations.) In fact we’ve had two ACFT ingest birds into their engines already in 2009 while doing transitions. High bypass turbofan engines like to suck things in when running at high RPMs like during takeoff. I’ve watched birds get sucked in after coming to close to the intake while doing high power maintenance runs on the ground.

I believe it was in 2002 that this ACFT from our unit ingested 2 turkeys in it’s #2 engine while landing in Bangor Maine. They got sucked in just as the pilot hit the thrust reversers shooting bird and engine parts forward and then back into the #1 engine and both left flaps. I think the final bill was around 10 million and took about 6 months to fix and fly home. Never was quite right after that though.

http://eu.airliners.net/photo/USA---Air/Boeing-KC-135E-Stratotanker/0536477/L/

If you zoom in real close you can barely make out the new nose are the crew chief gave it after the incident. He painted a turkey on the nose and renamed it “Osama bin Goblin”

Our birdstrikes do more damage to the airframe than to the engines, the PT6 engines we use are a reverse flow design that allows for a screen and a filter and has a much smaller intake opening than the big guys. The windscreens are a three piece design with the center section being safety glass while the two outer curved pieces are Plexiglas and over the years I've had a seagull shatter my front windscreen and two buzzards completely break out the side panes, one of them landing beside me in the cockpit. Also while in a steep turn several years ago I hit a buzzard just above the windshield, it got caught and rode up the wire strike cable, a cable affixed from the top of the windscreen to the top of the tail for deflecting electrical wire strikes away from the tail, lodging itself between the rudder and the vertical stabilizer darn near causing me to do a low attitude roll to the ground.
I've had both exhaust stacks almost closed completely from going through a flock of birds and all sorts of dented leading edges on the wings, vertical and horizontal stabilizers from birds. In all of the years I've been doing this I couldn't venture to try to guess how many hundreds of birds that have hit or just missed my windshield yet I've never seen one bird get hit by the rotating propellers it just went through.

Freakin' birds are dangerous little critters.

be careful Rick

I am Randy, it's the birds that really needs to be careful.

The day before this plane went down in NY, a couple of my neighbours and I were near Pearson Int'l airport having a coffee at Tim Hortons. The airport property basically comes right up to Dixie RD (where we were), and you can see most of the airport from the West side down one of the main runways. There are a handfull of trees and a couple of small ravines on the airport property and amongst the trees you could see a couple of deer. There was an issue a few years ago, about removing (killing) the deer in this particular area that had the environmentalists up in arms. Our conversation turned to the safety of the airplanes upon seeing these deer, and what could conceivably happen. I haven't heard of a problem with planes/deer yet but...as far as birds go Toronto uses trained Falcons in an effort to chase or keep birds away ( I think alot of airports do this now). Just seemed ironic that a day later that plane came down due to a bird strike.

I've heard of a couple of deer incursions on the runway, here's one example but beware of the graphic picture.

During the summer months we use a lot of very narrow roads along canals and sugar cane fields and I've had a couple of deer jump out from the 15ft tall sugar cane into the path of my plane and jumped right over a canal on the other side, no hits so far though. I did hit a huge raccoon year before last, I was using a narrow road with a cane field on one side and a big canal on the other side and while I was rolling out I saw the raccoon run from the field to cross the road, he couldn't do anything with the canal so he ran back towards the cane field but not before I hit him with my right landing wheel, I just felt a thump. One of the loading crew guys went and snatched him up for supper. I also hit a wheat field upside down in North Dakota a little over ten years ago, totaled the plane but I made it out with just a few stitches and bruises ... but that's another story altogether.

I better not come back to this thread, I can talk about flying all day ... can you tell?

Ouch!!!

No, no. Its "Oh dear!"

90 minutes??????? So you really live in Emerson? 30 minutes from my front door to the cottage at Winnipeg beach, 10 minutes more to the Seagrams plant

I guess I overestimated (using Google maps).

And your estimate does not take the speed limit into account.

Bren R.