BASHED and GOOSED

with a sort of explanation for

SNARGE and ZOONOSIS

it was a dark and not so stormy night of September 16th, 1970 as Air Canada Viscount # 649, on a flight from Winnipeg and Windsor enroute to points east, descended into the circuit of London Ontario’s airport in the early darkness for a visual approach on runway 23. Captain John Trevor, as pilot flying, turned on the landing lights, was reducing airspeed to mitigate bird strikes and turned off the bright overhead cockpit flood lighting leaving only the dim back-lit white instrument lights as the sole interior lighting. He called for the in-range check. Everything was smooth, calm and absolutely routine. First Officer Denis Hopkins, as pilot not flying, was just reaching up to the overhead panel to check that the pressurization was set for landing when… it occurred so suddenly and ear shatteringly loud that neither pilot realized what had happened. Hopkins felt like he had been punched in his face and chest and instinctively groped a handful of something smelly, warm and slimy from his shirtfront. in the dimly lit cockpit, he held his hands closer to the only source of light, the backlit instrument lights… it was viscera and blood!

No one with the experience of being inside a confined space when a firearm has been discharged will be surprised by the crew’s response to the acoustic shock.

His first thought was that someone had sneaked up behind him and shot him in the back.

Then he thought …

“Oh geez!... When does the pain start?”

Meanwhile Trevor, unscathed by the muck, quickly engaged the autopilot. The aircraft systems behaved normally with no discernible damage to any part of the aircraft including the windshield except for what were obviously birdie bits on the circuit breaker panel behind Hopkins. Covered in offal and feathers, Hopkins was systematically groping himself looking like he’d been in a giant pillow fight to the death. Trevor turned the cockpit flood lighting to full- bright, eyeballed Hopkins and in the brighter light he seemed all in one piece but a bit confused so he hollered!

“Hoppy! Are you okay?”

“Yeah yeah…i guess so” Hopkins hesitatingly replied.

Realizing Hopkins was still rattled and to snap him out of it, Trevor sharply and loudly commanded:

“Well get on with the check then!”

Hopkins’s training finally kicked in and he quickly finished the check.

The landing, rollout and arrival at the gate were smooth and uneventful. Trevor quickly disappeared with a mechanic to examine the a/c exterior. Amazingly, nothing was damaged, dented or missing. The only evidence of a bird strike was a greasy smear on Hopkins’s sliding side window. Company flight dispatch just could not get it through their heads that the only damage from a direct hit on the windshield was to the First officer’s dignity. At Trevor’s insistence dispatch reluctantly agreed to forecast the re- oosed mainder of the flight routine with only a minor delay. it was the angle the sliding window presented to the airstream and the energy produced by the bird's weight times the square of the aircraft’s speed that overcame both the locking over-centering mechanism of the small window and the five pounds per square inch pressure differential of the cabin. it popped the triangular shaped window perpendicularly back onto its sliding rail, opening it for a split second. The opening was just wide enough, about an inch and a half around the circumference of the window, to admit the bird's body. The relatively small opening combined with the fierce energy of the collision completely sliced, diced and eviscerated the entire medium sized goose. A nanosecond later and…Viola! The cabin pressure differential and the spring loaded closing mechanism slammed the plug type window back into its proper slot.

Bird Strikes have proven to be a major threat to airliners. The most recent deadstick landing into the Hudson River made famous by pilot Chesley Sullenberger was the result of the Airbus A320 inhaling a gaggle of Canada Geese a short time after take off from New York's laGuardia airport. There is proof of a total of 30 fatal accidents the destruction of at least 52 civil aircraft and 190 deaths attributed to bird strikes. Pictured is an example of a pilot's nightmare.

Meanwhile in the cockpit, Hopkins had been abandoned to his own devices. He didn’t relish running the gauntlet through enroute passengers lingering in the cabin blissfully unaware that anything was amiss. As is often the case, the Flight Attendants came to the rescue, wiped his face and gave him one of the red blankets boarded for passenger comfort to throw over his shoulders to cover his badly bloodied shirt. So with hat on head, looking like Chief Sitting Bull, he went through the cabin past the gaping passengers to the terminal operations room, changed his shirt, gave himself a quick splash of Old Spice after-shave and returned to the cockpit… good to go.

How did a BASH, (Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard), on the nose result in zero damage to the venerable Viscount when at the very least the windshield should have been cracked if not broken? And how was it that instead of being splattered on the windshield and or fuselage did the SNARGE, (an acronymic euphemism for bird strike bird remains composed of a mixture of the words snot and garbage), end up in the First Officer’s lap?

The chances of a pilot being killed or even being injured resulting from a BASH are estimated to be one in a billion flying hours. Except for Hopkins’s badly bruised chest, in 2003, forensic DNA testing on SNARGE was introduced by an international agreement to study the $1.2 billion BASH damage caused annually to commercial aircraft globally. This to determine the species and gender of the birds involved. it was then that a more sinister danger to pilots and ground crew became evident. Unknown to both our heroes and the ground clean-up crew they could have contracted ZOONOSiS, (an infectious disease that is transmitted between human and animal species), with possible debilitating side effects or even death. in the words of the academia more study is needed to determine the health threat of those handling SNARGE.

Trevor and Hopkins were physically uninjured.