"Susan VanCamp" wrote in message hlink.net...
Birds and Lieutenants scare me more than anything in the air...

I second Jim's words -- seems the MOAs and Restricted Areas have an
abundance of turkey buzzards and re-tailed hawks -- lethal-sized creatures
when they get in your way at high Q.

I've run into four birds in the course of my career, 3 daytime, 1 at night
(at 1500'AGL). Fortunately, they were the smaller varieties -- 2 starlings,
2 undetermined. One of the starlings punched a neat hole the size of my
fist in the leading edge of the intake, went through a couple vertical frame
members and lodged next to a fuel cell. Never knew anything happened 'til a
PC found it post flight in the fuel pits...Class C damage at the time.

Luckiest bird strike story I've ever heard occurred in the sixties at
the AFB I was living on at the time. Pupil pilot on solo night flight
in MB326 was on the approach, a couple of miles out, when he called
the tower saying he was climbing and abandoning the approach as he
thought he'd suffered a birdstrike. Aircraft
seemed fine so he made a second approach and landed safely without
further ado.

On inspection feathers, blood, damage to the wing leading edge and
sand were found. Sand? Next morning they took a chopper and flew
along this character's
flight path to see if they could find the victim. And indeed, about 4
miles before the runway they found a dead ostrich on a sand dune. The
pupil pilot had been misreading his altimeter by a 1000 feet
(apparently fairly easy to do with those old altimeters) and was
virtually on the deck when he thought he was up in the wild blue (or
black, for pedants) still. When he climbed to gain altitude and
assess the damage it is thought he must have barely scraped past a set
of high-tension electrical cables right in front of the dune. Very
lucky little boy, that!