Someone asked the question “How high can birds fly?” and Cecil responded by saying “On November 29, 1975 one was sucked into a jet engine 37,900 feet above the Ivory Coast in West Africa. The plane was damaged but landed safely. What the bird was doing up so high I have no idea, since this species is not migratory.” He also said that another bird was sucked into a plane engine.
My question is: If these planes are moving at hundreds of miles an hour, and the bird is pretty much vaporized by the jet engines…how the hell did they know what kind of bird it was that got sucked in???
I imagine all it would take for a positive ID would be a feather or two. Not likely that there would be NO evidence left, if it was big enough to do damage.
Knowing the FAA, it wouldn’t surprise me if they found a bit of shredded airworthiness certificate or aircraft registration in the bird wreckage.
I worked at a defense contractor for airborne radar systems once upon a time. Now picture this… we’re all sitting around a conference table discussing waveguide failures on fighter jet radars when some bigwhig in a suit (a very expensive suit I might add) picks up one of the waveguides and says “what is all this material right here?” to which one of us lowly engineers replies “bird guts.”
The rather distressed look on his face and the speed at which he quickly placed the waveguide back on the table were priceless.
There was enough of a feather embedded in the goo that someone who knew bird feathers could have easily made an identification of the type of bird, and this was after the bird went through the nose cone of the plane and through the radar antenna. There was nothing else really identifiable. If it wasn’t for the feather we probably wouldn’t have known it was a bird.
It’s nice to be mistaken for The Master, but that was me, at least the bird part.
Well, they’re generally not completely vaporized, although they may be pretty well shredded. But usually there are enough scraps, especially feathers, to make a diagnosis.
This article explains how birds can often be identified from a single feather. Roxie Laybourne, of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, is the world authority on bird feathers and is often consulted on such cases. I believe people are now working on using DNA analysis for identification too.
SD Staff George
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
Curator of Birds
And in straight and level flight, what the sicentiest say is the speed limit of various birds and what a lot of pilots can attest to the speed of various bids are two different things.
But of course pilots are like UFO abductees, not real reliable ya know. Bwhahahahah
:::: and of couse most now know to never say anything.:::
So what’s the smallest, uh, Unit Of Bird (aviette?) you need to make an identification? A whole feather? Just a piece? One of the individual spines or whatever they’re called? Does it matter if it’s a wingtip feather or down? Part of the foot? The crop, the tongue, etc.? I guess I’m wondering how much variation there is even in the “standard” bird structures.
It really depends on the species of bird. Certain kinds of birds have unique structures to their feathers; e.g. owls have soft edges to their flight feathers so they can fly quietly. Some species have unique patterns or colors, or unique structures to the tongue, foot, etc, that would permit identification.
This article has more detailed information. As the previous article I linked to mentioned, Roxie Laybourne sometimes can identify a bird from a single down feather. From the article I linked to here:
Sorry, the link in my previous post should have been this one.
Potentially, yes. As the article mentions, this is increasingly being investigated. However, limitations are the cost, and the need for an extensive reference collection of DNA samples for comparison. The article also mentions that the keratin that makes up the feathers can be biochemically analyzed to make an ID.
