I saw this video recently on another forum. Good job to the flight crew for reacting correctly per procedure to an engine failure right after V1.
While I am nearly a double-ace when it comes to bird strikes (my count is sitting around 10), my most memorable was #7. Oct 10 2003 saw me flying a T210 on a night VFR charter flight from KSFD to KABR. I was cruising comfortably on a moonless night at 3500ft MSL and chatting amiably with my passenger when there was an enormous BANG that I felt through the airframe into my butt. A quick check of my engine instruments saw nothing wrong, but I couldn't help myself saying out loud, "What the F**k was that?!?" My passenger speechlessy pointed out the right side as if to say that the source of the bang occured there. I grabbed my flashlight and pointed the beam out the right window. To my dismay, I had a 2 foot section of my right wing leading edge flattened to the main spar about 5 feet away from the fuselage! The flat spot was actually around 8 inches thick, as opposed to being a nice curved aerodynamic surface. I immediately switched my fuel selector over to the left tank, and I said to my passenger, "Hunh... it looks like we hit a bird." I did notice that we had lost about 20kts of indicated airspeed, no doubt due to the added drag of the new flat spot on my right wing, and she certainly felt funny in the flight controls. I added some left rudder trim to compensate for the added drag and looked for my nearest landing field. It was nearby, but as I continued northwest I concluded that my right fuel tank had not been punctured and I elected to continue on to my destination.
I made a no-flap landing at KABR (I didn't want to play test pilot!) without event, although I certainly had to use a great deal of left aileron to compensate for the loss of lift on my right wing. We pushed the airplane into a hangar so we could inspect the damage, and I concluded that we had hit a Canadian Goose. Bits and pieces of the bird and its feathers were spattered along the fuselage from the right-side door all the way to the empennage. It was from the feather pieces that we concluded it was a Honker.
Afterwards, I had to marvel at the fact that considering geese always travel in flocks, I had only hit one! I sometimes still wonder: What happened to his buddies? They had to have been all around me, dodging me, and I didn't take one through the windshield.
The other thing I had to ask myself (and to answer the FAA on my birdstrike report) was what could I do differently in the future to prevent another occurance? My conclusion was to (1 Fly Higher, or (2 Have a landing light on at all times. My employer at the time always admonished us pilots against using the landing lights at anytime other than a night landing. He pointed out that those landing lights were only good for 50hrs of operation, and cost plenty to replace. However, I wonder to this day whether the use of a $75.00 landing light might have prevented this incident that cost $15,000.00 to repair?
I realize that none of this stuff compares remotely to what that 757 crew had to go through when they ingested a bird on takeoff, but I thought I would share my experience for everyone here to digest.
