The damage looks even worse in those last two pix
I would still be interested in seeing a picture taken from the LHS and what the wingtip looked like from there. Also, the fuel feed pipes etc hanging from the wing tip may have been affected by the airflow and above the wing in flight.
Not speculating about what happened nor trying to judge the pilot or his decisions, but more the interesting point for me is that he's aware he's hit something, presumably the aircraft must have handled reasonably well to get as far as they did, so to what extent did the pilot realise the order of magnitude of the damage?
As You Gimboid said, there must have been a hell of a bang, but as pilots we are trained to trust our eyes and verify most things visually .... if the damage is difficult to see/perceive, might one underrate it?
That's my main interested and learning point from this thread.
I've only once experienced a bird strike and that was on landing. Yes, there was a hell of a bang and the airport fire service reported 2/3 lapwings flying across our path, which I never saw (but I was RHS, looking at the airfield plate for taxiway info). All the evidence that remained was a red streak on the (undamaged) left main gear spat - no dead birds.
Ghengis
One might however reasonably question the airmanship of somebody who knowingly took a bird on take-off, and didn\'t simply do a circuit for a look at it on the ground.
Its hard to argue against that, on the other hand, the commander of the bmi flight took a hail encounter with sev turb and continued for another couple of hours.
Yes, the circumstances are different, but there is a line of thinking based around visual inspection, lack of obvious damage and the lowest cost solution (with safety parameters), supported by group reinforcement (in another context the PSA 727 CVR tapes are heart rending, when 3 crew mambers and a dead heading pilot on the jump seat appear to convince themselves that they have traffic in sight, when they do not.)
When commercial pressures meet airmanship, there\'s definitely potential for conflict of interest.
In my own are of expertise (project management), exactly the same issues arise, when decisions are driven by trade offs.
Hopefully, this incident (i.e that the aircraft flew for so long with som much damage) will give commercial pilots some hard data to justify why they did a circuit and precautionary landing and remove a bit of pressure from them.