Word of the day: Snarge
Bird strikes, when an unlucky bird hits an airborne plane, are serious problems. A friend of mine who worked at McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) said they tried a simulator that fired frozen chickens at static engines, but the flight characteristics weren't right. So they built a Chicken Gun, that fired a live chicken.
The military deals with feathered projectiles on a daily basis, and the most recent high-profile case came in 1995 when a flock of Canada geese brought down an AWACS, killing all 24 people on board.Now they're collecting snarge and using bird DNA to determine which species of birds are most often having this unforunate calamity.
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3 comments:
So they built a Chicken Gun, that fired a live chicken.
Does PETA know about this? ;-)
Mmmmmm...Roster Booster (painted on the side, I believe).
I don't think they fired that many, but when it is a 60 mil plane or some poultry, a few less chickens is probably ok. Not sure what the flight characteristics of live soybeans are anyways.
And don't forget the radio station in the 70's that dropped turkeys from a helicopter. I'm sure that was really an aeronautical engineer at the helm of that test.
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