Yeah, it depends...
I had a PW305B, a small fan engine, inhale a brown kite and not even cough. There was a horrible pong of roast kite in the cabin as kite residue was run through the air-cycle machine but that was all. There were a few feathers wrapped around some of the stators behind the fan and some traces on the fan blades but these modern titanium, single-crystal fan blades are tough! I guess our luck there was that Mr Kite mostly went down the bypass duct and not into the core.
On the other hand, I remember several incidents at Lagos of big fan engines being ruined by bird ingestion, luckily without any accidents resulting.
We will have to wait for the report but I find it surprising that small birds can cause a big fan engine to quit. Was that a known problem before this accident?
Just to put things in perspective, if Ciampino has bird strikes, well, Port Harcourt, Nigeria had an incident where an Air France A-330 had multiple cow strikes, when they were very, very lucky not to have lost the aircraft.
Last edited by chuks; 14th Nov 2008 at 10:29.