Please forgive a intrusion by a ship modeler who’s straying a long way from home. Maybe everyone in this forum has heard the following sad story - but if not, everyone needs to know it.
It’s fairly well known that, a few years ago, NASA, in its ongoing effort to figure out the potential effects of collisions with birds on spacecraft and aircraft, developed a cannon-like machine that, in a laboratory environment, fires dead chickens at airplane and space shuttle mockups. It seems that a British manufacturer of railroad locomotives was concerned about what would happen if one of its latest high-speed trains collided with a flying bird. So the company ordered a duplicate of the NASA chicken cannon.
The first chicken they fired at the windshield of the locomotive smashed the glass, went straight through the head of the dummy sitting on the operator’s seat, continued through the headrest behind it, and imbedded itself in the steel bulkhead behind the seat. The engineers, needless to say, found this disturbing. They sent NASA an e-mail, describing the problem in detail and asking, “what on earth should we do now?”
NASA sent back an e-mail consisting of three words: “Thaw the chicken.”
not a bad story… might want to file this one under Urban Legend though as variants of it have been going about for years… just do a Yahoo! search for “nasa and chicken and cannon” and you will get more info on them…
Heard this on the Discovery Channel show ‘Mythbusters’ about a year back as well. I doubt VERY much that any chicken has that kind of penetrating power and on the Mythbusters show, every one they fired out of their own chicken gun disintegrated after impact with the first object it was fired into. I see no way it would every be possible to imbed a chicken - no matter HOW frozen - into anything metal.
I have however seen air force videos relating to the testing of jet fighter canopies and their resistance to bird strikes. They were testing a new flexible material that would flex when hit rather than shatter. Pretty cool stuff - unless you were the turkey they used to test!
Back when the 777 came out PBS ran a special called 21st Century Jet and one of the segments in it was about the engines. There was footage of geese (can’t recall if frozen or not) being chucked into Rolls Royce and GE engines. Neither engine survived in operable condition but the Rolls died a spectacular death (and ultimately lost the competition).
This subject was touched on lightly about a year or more ago here in the Forum. It was referred to as the Rooster Booster. Try Googling that and see what comes up.
Another NASA culture legend… your tax dollars at work
Aftere the collapse of the Soviet Union, NASA scientists finally got to meet their Soviet counterparts and compare notes. One of NASA’s many technical accomplishments was a ball point pen that functioned in a zero g environment. When the subject of data collection in orbit came up, the Soviets were quizzed about how they approached the ball point pen problem. The incredulous Russians responded that they used a pencil.
Hey-
Here’s a picture of an AV-8B Harrier that hit a Canada Goose. A bit bigger than a chicken perhaps, but it did penetrate the metal inlet lip and blew out the suction door behind it on the way out. It also holed a fuel feed tank, so he lost a lot of fuel. Some goose parts and metal bits went into the engine, but it continued to run and the pilot made a successful emergency landing.
I remember seeing that 777 video, Nova episode I think. That chicken got chopped up like ti was going through a meat grinder. Anyone for chicken waffers?
If you want some fun, check out Google.com and look up images with “airplane bird strike”. I found a 737 that must have hit a small flock of birds. One even knocked part of the instrument panel out of place! Viewer discretion is advised.
However “urban legend” it may sound the chicken cannon story is true, with a modification. It was The then General Dynamics that designed the “chicken Canon” for testing the F-16 Canopy for strength, after a couple of really nasty birdstrikes in Europe, including one in Norway where the pilot was struck by the bird (But managed to eject) after the bird penetrated. The cannon was lent to British Rail in the 1980’s and they DID test the frozen chickens on their new intercity locomotive.
Wether the bird is strong enough is really a point of mass, not of structure, and the birds go through even helicopter windscreens at the modest speeds they travel in.
Hope that answer some questions!
There are images of an israli blackhawk somewhere, with a crane through the cockpit windscreen (Not nice) just search for that![;)]
The GenDyn story I have from one of the engineers there who worked with it.
An RAF C130 over Ethiopia was hit by a Vulture at about 28000ft.
I cannot find any photos on line but it landed with the vulture stuck in the first officers side of the cockpit.
He was injured, but the bird came off much worse.
Check this out.
Ask Fabio the male model about geese. He was riding in the front of “Apollo’s Chariot”, a new rollercoaster at Busch Gardens. As the coaster neared a lake, a Canadian goose flew up and collided with Fabio’s head. Killed the goose and whacked the mess out of Fabio. heh heh heh
Oh, I know that story!!!
If any of you watch Myth Busters on Discovery channel, They had a myth busting thingy about it and they launched a thawed and unthawed chicken through a cessna windshield and thawed or not, they observed the impact force was the same and It went through the windshield and if there was a pilot,
sorry to criticise, but there were some chicken chunks left(you know, the hunk except for the wings and its head and the stuff that sticks out)
and they did test it out on different stuff.
the big mistake the Mythbusters guys made was that they didn’t purchase the bird proof windshield.
You need to believe VERY much that a chicken or any other kind of medium to large size bird can go through metal. Here is a picture of a T-44A that had an encounter with a bird. While in the Air Force we had a couple of bird strikes on the F-4. Most were just sucked into an engine or put a dent in the nose or wing, but we had one that hit low on the left winscreen, shattered the glass and severly injured the pilot when that shattered plexi and what was left of the bird imbedded in his shoulder. I can’t remember who actually landed the jet but I do remember the mess the crew chief had to take care of.
The Rooster Booster is (or was in the mid-80s) at the Arnold Engineering facility in Huntsville, AL. I went on a tour there when I was in college. They showed us a film showing tests of canopies and engines. The turbine engines that failed the test failed pretty spectacularly! They’d fire a frozen chicken wrapped in a plastic bag. The guide told us they had to do it that way or only bones would reach the target.
The most impressive film was a test of an F-16 canopy. The camera was stationed in front of the test cockpit, looking back. They had a pilot dummy in the seat, wearing a helmet. The chicken hit the canopy, which dented in far enough to hit the pilot’s helmet. The impact was so severe that the pilot’s helmet deformed into an egg shape, then snapped back (this was all in slow-motion). The helmet deformed several times as the shock wave dissipated. Kind of like ringing a bell. There was no apparent damage to the canopy or the helmet, but they said the pilots brains would have been turned to jelly!
About 15 years later, I was very thankful they do this kind of testing when we took a fairly large bird in the windscreen right in front of my nose at 250 knots. Shattered the outer layer of glass, and scared the daylights out of me!
The jet was probably doing about mach .7, normal cruising speeds. The thing too remember though, it’s not so much speed as it is the amount of mass and how square it manages to hit something. I know that in my own driving experience a fairly small rock hitting my windshield at a normal speed has done some pretty impressive damage.
Years ago I saw a newspaper clipping showing an F-111 that had nailed a large bird at 500+ knots and 500 ft. The bird went through the radome, which caused the radome to peel back in strips so the nose looked like it was wearing a grass hula skirt. It looked like the bird crushed the radar unit clear back to the bulkhead.
Ben
BTW Wayners, Seymour just hasn’t been the same since they retired the F-4Es. They had an F-4F fly during last year’s open house. It was good to hear J-79s again!
