On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 21:21:05 GMT, Newps wrote:

Howard Berkowitz wrote:

There are airplanes, including 747s, that have continued to fly quite
nicely, if rather noisily in the cockpit, after striking Canada geese
with the windscreens, cracking them.

The RJ's that everybody is flying now crack windshields like they are
going out of style. Just last week we had one land here so spider
webbed that the captain could see nothing out his side. They apparently
are very simple to replace as they were on the road again in less than
24 hours.

It took 8 hours to turn a 747 that struck a snow goose on the way to
Heathrow about a decade and a half, maybe two decades, ago. And this
included getting the replacement windshield in from Washington.
However, the bird strike was reported while the airplane was still in
the air, so it may well have taken more time, time that didn't show up
in the delay.

When we boarded the airplane, it was impossible to tell that anything
had gone amiss. The cockpit didn't even smell of goose entrails,
although what usually happens in such strikes is that the goose is
pureed through the cracks in the windshield. Eeeuuugh.

Mary

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Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer