This is my nineth year of a EMS assignment its not a hero job assignment, and I just finished 4 days of rig crew changes all over the Gulf as well and doing some friendly flying around as spring break is in full swing on the beaches.
Fying in the gulf has all about weight and the oil companies were happy with the weight carrying addition without glass and the A/C generator and they speced out offshore configured aircraft as such for their operations.
There have been far more fatal accidents for other causes than bird strikes.
Safety will increase with increase in technology. and Bird vs aircraft is always a ongoing study.
I am sure the NTSB will show that no matter what windshields glass or plexi that a bird strike of that size collapsed the "center post" into the throttle quadrant shutting down the engines. And the pilots were unable to recover.
Sikorsky is getting a lot of mileage out of the windshield letter but there are still no FAA fllight manual changes.
Cause the focus is actually the center post collapsing and not the windshields
A one in a million shot or to be exact many millions as PHI has over 10 million hours logged to date.