Sunday, March 09, 2008
bird sushi
pardon the geek attack, but this piece of randomness i had to put up. courtesy of my last lecture with a german prof who used to work for rolls royce - the plane engines, not the cars. before an engine can be deemed safe to be used onboard an aircraft, it has to pass stringent real-life simulations. you don't really want your engine dying on you mid-air like a cinquecento might do on the road. one of the tests that has to be done is with birds. yes. you see, since planes fly, they tend to have lots of accidents with birds. this means that there is actually a rig where birds are thrown into the engine. and i quote : then they are killed, and boiled and thrown right in there" when i heard that i was like.. wha...?!!! but he was kidding of course. anyway. the engine must be able to survive a couple of medium birds weighing 700g each or a massive bird weighing 1+kg. these birds (no more than inanimate lumps of clay or plaster for rolls royce - some other pple actually use poor frozen birds..) are then shot into the running engine and everyone at the test site prays the engine will emerge victorious against the dead "bird". of course when the real bird hits it, the rotating fan makes sure the bird gets sliced up into pieces - the faster the bird or plane was flying, the bigger the slices. morbid huh. actually, birds fly into engines all the time and the pilot hardly even realises when a small bird goes in. the problem comes when the birds come in the slightly larger variety, or there are too many of them sucked in - sorta like stuffing your mouth when it's already full of food; one at a time is no problem. so apparently, there is this canadian goose, which is 400g heavier than the normal "big bird" estimates done for all planes. meaning practically all planes on the market now can't ingest this bird without significant damage. check out the damages. i never really thought about how serious bird strike could be: Date: 09 June 2001 Aircraft: Airbus 300 Airport: Dayton Intl. (OH) Phase of Flight: Climb (200’ AGL) Effect on Flight: Precautionary landing Damage: Engine Wildlife Species: Canada goose Comments from Report: A Canada goose was ingested into the #2 engine shortly after lift off. The engine had an uncontained failure and a precautionary landing was made. The cost to repair ($3.5 million) was not economical so the engine was scrapped. wanna go to canada anyone? *grins*  p.s. there ARE videos online, but they are waaaay too morbid for my tastes. hence they're not here. but kidding aside, it's a major problem, and there have been quite a number of fatalities due to aircraft collision with birds. not the big jumbojets, mind you, but the smaller civilian aircraft.
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