This is the most bizarre aviation video I have seen in a long time. It was shot in Miami just before the Superbowl, and it shows the results of a bird strike in a helicopter.
Bird strikes are unpleasant for all involved, starting with the bird. Small-seeming birds can do an amazingly large amount of damage to an aircraft (cf: "
Miracle on the Hudson"). This involves a big bird, and the results are much different from normal for all involved.
Thanks to John Tierney of
Sense & Nonsense for this tip; original source was
here. The video has the virtue of being both creepy and semi-miraculous.
UPDATE: Thanks to reader J. Stein, I now know that the headline for this item should actually be "turkey vulture strike." Details below. Live and learn!
"In the interests of communicating clearly with your international
readership-- this is a Turkey Vulture, not a Buzzard. Buzzard is the
name of a large class of buteo hawks on the other side of the Atlantic
(same family as our North American Red-Tailed Hawks).
http://www.naturalbornbirder.com/gallery/Common_buzzard_8664_e.jpg
http://www.dvoc.org/Conservation/Corner2007/Images/Turkey-Vulture-BINNS-IMG_96.jpg
"Presumably in the pre-binocular days, European settlers saw these large
soaring creatures in the sky and thought they were actually buzzards,
and the colloquial name stuck even after the mistake became clear."
Read the complete post at http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=24fe85334dc67f07f007fc87e8c69ccc
Posted
14 Feb 2010 20:30
by
James Fallows