Birdstrike at Night!
 

The other day, whilst out of 4000ft after take-off in a mountainous area AT 2AM, we heard a loud thump on the nose. No engine or airframe vibration and pressurisation was noral. It sounded like a birdstrike but we only confirmed after landing a couple of hours later.

Two questions:

1) Is it usual for birds to fly at 2 in the morning........ and 4000 ft high?!!!

2) Our company has no SOP on this, but should no obvious damage to airframe or engines be evident, do other companies reccomend a immediate return to land for an inspection?

Yes, many species of birds fly at night. Should we fly at night in their airspace is another question.

What was your IAS? Were you limited by speed control on the SID?

Have your engineers recovered any feathers or other remains to do a DNA analysis? It may help to know what you hit ( or what hit you)

There's a formula about mass times speed etc. so the damge a small bird can do is out of all proportion to its size.

Look at the damage that small bird called Katie Price is doing:eek:

Sir George Cayley

http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-353406.html

https://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-132117.html

Who'd have thought it?

FWIW, I have had a birdstrike at night descending through FL 90.

I've had a lot of birdstrikes, most uneventful. Two which did cause damage both occured at 10,000', both around 0100 in the morning, and both in mountainous areas.

I doubt the birds would adhere to it even if they did! :)

I know they do fly in cloud. Had one end up in the Battery bay of a Dash 8 300 in IMC at 2500' - made quite a mess and there was a decent thump on arrival!

:} looks like we're not the only ones doing IFR and LowVis....

I knew I had heard of birdstrikes at allmost 300 before.
 

"The altitude record is held by a Rüppell's griffon Gyps rueppelli, a vulture with a 10-foot wingspan. On November 29, 1975 one was sucked into a jet engine 37,900 feet above the Ivory Coast in West Africa. The plane was damaged but landed safely. What the bird was doing up so high I have no idea, since this species is not migratory.

The bird that flies highest most regularly is the bar-headed goose Anser indicus, which travels directly over the Himalayas en route between its nesting grounds in Tibet and winter quarters in India. They are sometimes seen flying well above the peak of Mt. Everest at 29,035 ft. Birds have some natural advantages for getting oxygen at high altitudes, in particular an arrangement of air sacs that allows them to circulate inhaled air twice through the lungs with each breath--much more efficient than the in-and-out system used by mammals. Bar-headed geese have special adaptations that make them even better at high-flying than other birds. They have a special type of hemoglobin that absorbs oxygen very quickly at high altitudes, and their capillaries penetrate especially deep within their muscles to transfer oxygen to the muscle fibers
.
Other high flying birds include whooper swans, once observed by a pilot at 27,000 feet over the Atlantic between Iceland and Europe, and bar-tailed godwits (a shorebird), which have been seen at almost 20,000 feet. The record for North America is a mallard duck that collided with an airplane at 21,000 feet above Elko, Nevada in July, 1963. Most birds, though, fly lower--waterfowl typically at between 200-4,000 feet, and small songbirds at between 500-2,000 feet. However, the tiny Blackpoll warbler will fly up to 16,000 feet high in order to catch favorable winds on migration between Canada and South America. I'm not sure how well a sparrow would do, but similar-sized birds are quite capable of flying very high indeed. "

REF:
The Straight Dope: How high can birds and bees fly?

Did an analysis of all available North American bird strike data a few years ago for a report and one of the data sets was day vs. night. The data showed that there were slightly higher numbers of strikes at night vs during the day.

Normalizing that for aircraft movements then shows that the strike rate is higher at night than during the day.

Lots of migratory birds fly at night to take advantage of favourable winds. The bad news is they sometimes fly quite high and their weights and flcokcing characteristics exceed the airframe, windhsield and engine certification standards.

Yes, birds do fly in IMC. No the radar does not have any effect on them.

There have also been two bird strikes above 30,000 feet in North America in the last 5 years.

Night Birdstrike
 

Two years ago, while flying from MAD to BCN, over the RES vor, descending through FL180, we heard a loud bump left side of the nose. All parameters where normal as well, and we never thought the posibility of a bird strike at this altitude at midnight, even more, while flying in and out of clouds. Once we where parking the airplane at the gate, we notice the face of the bridge operator looking to left part of the noise and inmediatly understood something abnormal was coming up. The nose was full of blood and minor damages to the airplane's skin.

Still looking to find an explanation to that.

Our nocturnal little friends
 

Bat strikes have been known to happen.

Learn something every day.

Mount Everest grew 6 feet in 1999 (new survey). It used to be 29,029ft when I went to school.:)

I've had a bird hit at night, descending through 4000' in a Piper Aztec.
Found little bits of bird roasting on the engine the next morning. No damage.

Bat strikes are not uncommon, but not at altitude. Bats are mammals and their diet means they hunt at low altitude.

Muduckace,
You don't know what the bird was doing up so high?
It was trying to establish a world altitude record.

Beachbumflyer
 

Granted they had set altitude records thousands of years prior to mechanized flight. Wonder if we would even have obtained mechanized flight W/O their influence. Let's now take a silent moment to thank the true aviators for our jobs.:ok:

Flew through a bunch of large, light-colored(at least partially) birds crossing over Sacramento-Mather Field at about 2:30 A.M. at night after takeoff, in a B-727. At 2000 ft climbing and and 200 kts. A loud bang was felt below, (some went over us), but no other (e.g. engine) anomalies, so continued. Quite dark, don't remember a moon. In Seattle a large red bloody, feathery spot on the radome and fuselage at the radome/fuselage juncture, and glass fibers showing that the radome had been forced-in and rebounded too much(had to be replaced).

All aircraft lights were on. (at night, but with little other reference, it's probably hard for birds to judge what to do with their flight path, when they see lights, but no aircraft) And we can't see them at all, so we can't help.

A seagull hit with a loud thud right smack on the windshield at 250kts during initial climb out at JFK at night; but no damage to the window. :eek:

I presume the bird decided to give it the 6 feet of clearance to avoid the Sherpa sitting on the top!!:}