FOXSYLVANIA

– – Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock was right; the birds are up to something!  A United Airlines Boeing 737 struck a bird as it descended into Denver International airport Tuesday morning, leaving a gaping hole in the nose of the plane.  An emergency was declared, and Flight 1475 was able to land safely.

Now airliner engines themselves have to be designed and demonstrated able to, err, ingest a four-pound bird without endangering people on the plane.  No engine flying, however, is designed or built to survive ingestion of an eight-to 15-pound bird.  The number of animal strikes has increased from 1,793 in 1990 to 9,622 in 2010, with 70% of those strikes occurring when aircraft are at less than an elevation of 500 feet.

The remains of this particular bird, recovered from the aircraft, will be analyzed by experts from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who will help to identify the species…

This entry was posted on August 1, 2012 at 1:32 am and is filed under animal occurrences, animals, feathered friends. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.