Bird forces plane to abort takeoff

[DurianFlyer]

Don't know if this news made headlines in your region, but here in my place a bird strike crippled a plane and forced an aborted takeoff. Someone uploaded a video in Facebook but took it down today. Fortunately I was able to view it and got screenshots of the bird which looked like a brahminy kite, which is endemic in our area. We had news of birds downing drones, here we almost had a bird downing an airline! From the video it appeared that the plane is at or almost at v-one when the bird hit. Knowing the airfield the pilot had less than 2kms of runway left. Fortunately he was able to bring the plane to a halt safely, you could hear the braking tires in the video and the roar of the reverse thrusters. Anyway, here's the screen grabs of the bird about to be sucked in.

 

[FlushVision]

Poor bird. Somehow I find the second screenshot a bit upsetting knowing that when that image was taken the bird had less than a second to live.

 

[AeroJ]

Yeah, you'd have the think the bird was very unlucky to find itself there and then - even as confrontational as they are with things their own size and larger, I can't believe a raptor of that class isn't intelligent enough to stay well away from fast moving things thousands of times its own size, unless there are circumstances that mean it can't avoid it. At least it didn't suffer...

 

[DurianFlyer]

Yeah, I love photographing those birds. I still have one shot a month ago, a still stuck in the workflow. Anyway, if something big and loud is bearing down my six, I would have veered to the right but that bird did not do anything but stuck to his course. Makes you think of dolphins swimming alongside a boat, could he be playing with the plane? Flying alongside it?

 

[Dustoff]

At least it wasn’t a drone

 

[DurianFlyer]

At least it wasn’t a drone

Well, I tried flying the H on that white circle on the map. ST screamed NFZ! I guess it's also enforced here hehe. I doubt if dji's can fly here as well, being they're more big brotherly than yuneec.

 

[DurianFlyer]

Here's the video. Warning, graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.

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[FlushVision]

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Poor bird.

You can see smoke coming from the engine after it swallowed the bird. Good call by the pilot.

 

[DurianFlyer]

If you noticed, after he picked up the phone and pointed it outside again, that building is the old terminal, 750m from the end of the runway. Close call. If that happened at v-r, this could have been the scenario...

Pictures from crash drill 2 days after the incident. Actually on the very day the bird strike occurred, we were on site having a dry run for the crash drill. We thought it's part of the practice after hearing the radio calls till someone screamed "not a drill, real life!!!"