page_title: Bird strike
section_title: History of incidents
hierarchical_section_title: Bird strike / History of incidents
context_page_description: A bird strike—sometimes called birdstrike, bird ingestion, bird hit, or bird aircraft strike hazard —is a collision between an airborne animal and a manmade vehicle, usually an aircraft. The term is also used for bird deaths resulting from collisions with structures such as power lines, towers and wind turbines.
  Bird strikes are a significant threat to flight safety, and have caused a number of accidents with human casualties. There are over 13,000 bird strikes annually in the US alone. However, the number of major accidents involving civil aircraft is quite low and it has been estimated that there is only about 1 accident resulting in human death in one billion flying hours. The majority of bird strikes cause little damage to the aircraft; however the collision is usually fatal to the bird involved.
  Particularly, the Canada goose has been ranked as the third most hazardous wildlife species to aircraft with approximately 240 goose-aircraft collisions in the United States each year. 80% of all bird strikes go unreported.
  Most accidents occur when a bird collides with the windscreen or is sucked into the engine of jet aircraft.
context_section_description: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates bird strikes cost US aviation 400 million dollars annually and have resulted in over 200 worldwide deaths since 1988. In the United Kingdom, the Central Science Laboratory estimates that worldwide, the cost of birdstrikes to airlines is around US$1.2 billion annually. This cost includes direct repair cost and lost revenue opportunities while the damaged aircraft is out of service. Estimating that 80% of bird strikes are unreported, there were 4,300 bird strikes listed by the United States Air Force and 5,900 by US civil aircraft in 2003.
  The first reported bird strike was by Orville Wright in 1905. According to the Wright Brothers' diaries, "Orville [...] flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over the fence into Beard's cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve."
  During the 1911 Paris to Madrid air race, French pilot Eugene Gilbert encountered an angry mother eagle over the Pyrenees. Gilbert, flying an open-cockpit Bleriot XI, was able to ward off the large bird by firing pistol shots at it but did not kill it.
  The first recorded bird strike fatality was reported in 1912 when aero-pioneer Cal Rodgers collided with a gull which became jammed in his aircraft control cables. He crashed at Long Beach, California, was pinned under the wreckage, and drowned.
  During the 1952 edition of the Carrera Panamericana, eventual race winners Karl Kling and Hans Klenk suffered a bird strike incident when the Mercedes-Benz W194 was struck by a vulture in the windscreen. During a long right-hand bend in the opening stage taken at almost 200 km/h (120 mph), Kling failed to spot vultures sitting by the side of the road. When the vultures were scattered after hearing the virtually unsilenced W194 coming towards them, one vulture impacted through the windscreen on the passenger side. The impact was enough to briefly knock Klenk unconscious. Despite bleeding badly from facial injuries caused by the shattered windscreen, Klenk ordered Kling to maintain speed, and held on until a tire change almost 70 km (43 mi) later to clean himself and the car up. For extra protection, eight vertical steel bars were bolted over the new windscreen. Kling and Klenk also discussed the species and size of the dead bird, agreeing that had had a minimum 115-centimetre (45 in) wingspan and weighed as much as five fattened geese.
  Alan Stacey's fatal accident during the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix was caused when a bird hit him in the face on lap 25, causing his Lotus 18-Climax to crash at the fast, sweeping right hand Burnenville curve. According to fellow driver Innes Ireland's testimony in a mid-1980s edition of Road & Track magazine, Ireland stated that some spectators claimed that a bird had flown into Stacey's face while he was approaching the curve, possibly knocking him unconscious, or even possibly killing him by breaking his neck or inflicting a fatal head injury, before the car crashed.
  The greatest loss of life directly linked to a bird strike was on October 4, 1960, when a Lockheed L-188 Electra, flying from Boston as Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, flew through a flock of common starlings during take-off, damaging all four engines. The aircraft crashed into Boston harbor shortly after takeoff, with 62 fatalities out of 72 passengers. Subsequently, minimum bird ingestion standards for jet engines were developed by the FAA.
  NASA astronaut Theodore Freeman was killed in 1964 when a goose shattered the plexiglass cockpit canopy of his Northrop T-38 Talon. Shards were ingested by the engines, leading to a fatal crash.
  In 1988, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 604 sucked pigeons into both engines during takeoff and then crashed, killing 35 passengers.
  In 1995, a Dassault Falcon 20 crashed at a Paris airport during an emergency landing attempt after sucking lapwings into an engine, which caused an engine failure and a fire in the airplane's fuselage; all 10 people on boar
caption: A Fw 190D-9 of 10./JG 54 Grünherz, pilot (Leutnant Theo Nibel), downed by a partridge which flew into the nose radiator near Brussels on 1 January 1945
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