What REALLY Happens When Birds Fly Into A Plane Engine?

What REALLY Happens When Birds Fly Into A Plane Engine?

Meet the US Navy’s E-4B Mercury. Designed by Boeing, the plane is called the “doomsday plane” because it was designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Yes, not even a nuke can take this thing down. But there’s one thing that can.

Birds.

In 2019, a Mercury almost went down when a bird knocked out one of its four engines, causing $2 million in damage. It was hardly a unique incident, though. According to the Navy Times, it was the fifth time in a decade that a Navy plane had been seriously damaged by a bird strike. And that’s just the Navy.

USA Today reported that in 2018, planes crashed into more than 40 birds per day, with LiveScience putting the human death toll at over 200 fatalities caused by mid-air bird strikes since 1988. The rate of bird strikes also seems to be increasing, rising from less than 2,000 in 1990 to more than 14,000 in 2018.

Still, the higher you get in the air, the less control man has over birds. And the busier the skies, the more likely collisions become. Still, despite a rise in the incidence of strikes, the number of those causing damage to planes has decreased thanks to improved safety measures.

So what REALLY happens when a bird gets sucked into a plane engine?