Only twice have I been concerned about birds when higher than about 500' AGL. A couple of weekends ago I was climbing through 2500' just south-east of Bagby in North Yorkshire when I saw a large duck or goose a couple of hundred feet above me in the 11 o'clock, heading amost parallel but moving slowly left-to-right. I had clear space ahead and below so dived under him until he was well behind.

Friend of mine had a close call with a flock of seagulls (really!) on approach at the weekend. Lots of unrepeatable swearing afterwards, as one of the gulls had obviously been pretty scared by the near miss, and had clearly had a heavy meal earlier in the day... :yuk:

For those with little knowledge of birdstrikes this is a very good document to read :ok:

My PPL(H) instructor managed to "hop" us over a flock of starlings (I think) approaching the heli strip at Redhill a few years back. I hadn't even seen then until the last moment, so I'm pretty sure that without that manoeuver we'd have created some shredded tweet.

(why is it that only the birds get to go on strike, then?)

:E

From my dubious degraded memory banks, the highest recorded birdstrike was in a DC-9 (probably) over the Andes (definitely) at around 30,000' (give or take a few) and the bird was a condor (sure of that one). Apparently they couldn't figure out why the engine had suffered a spectacular failure until one of the engineers found some feathers lodged in the whirring bits.......

Lucky I don't fly that high :ok:

There was also one at a similar height over the Atlantic.

From memory a goose of some description, destroyed the nose cone, radar and buckled the pressure bulkhead!!!

http://www.bartholomew.co.uk/birdstrike2.jpg

WF.