Flock that big I’m surprised they didn’t see any of it coming beforehand and delayed/canceled the takeoff, not uncommon to have to do that at SMF and OAK. I’m not familiar with the layout and visibility at SDF though
Am a birder and I agree. Last year I was waiting to board a flight at FLL and was staring out the windows overlooking the airfield. A murmuration of starlings materialized and grew to roughly 500,000 birds within minutes. (I know how to count large numbers of birds).
It was extraordinary. I'd always wanted to see a murmuration in person. But it was definitely a solid example of "be careful what you wish for."
LOL that would make it at least twice as hard! I'm trying to imagine counting the wings of hundreds of thousands or millions of birds and my brain just broke.
Ehh, you won’t be able to see a flock of small birds like that before it’s too late. My last bird strike was into a flock like this on approach, and I didn’t see them until about 2 seconds before they hit us.
It must have reeked inside the jet. Ingesting all those birds causes a stench in the air taken from the engines to run the air conditioning packs. And, this is the least of the problems from the bird strikes.
It is disgusting. We hit seagulls going into MYR once and the smell was awful. Like fried chicken and burned hair. I was on the same AC a month or so later and it still reeked. Pax would ask when we were serving the meal because it smelled so delicious onboard. We didn’t serve hot meals. It was fun to watch their face when I told them what they were actually smelling.
Have you sat I. A Popeyes for too long. The first 5 minutes are delicious. After that you don’t want to look at friend chicken for a month. Always do take out
“I’ll have whatever delicious thanksgiving feast you’re cooking over there!”
“Sorry maam, you’re just smelling the blood bones and and caracass of a number of filthy birds we made into a smoothie. We do have pretzels, however!”
The air conditioning packs use air from the engines that gets transferred to the cabin? I kinda always figured there would be some kind of heat exchanger, but then again I don't know jack shit about how AC on a plane works.
It’s not just about heat exchange, you need compressed air to pressurize the cabin. Conveniently jet engines are really good at that. So some air is bleed off the compressor side and fed directly into the cabin (after some conditioning)
The 787 is a rare exception to not use bleed air.
I suspect we will see more jets that don’t as the effects of volatiles from the jet fuel getting into the cabin get better understood.
I believe the 787 system also brings about weight and maintenance reductions because it eliminates many pneumatic components that are required on a traditional bleed air system.
Only in certain engine types - a lot of aircraft have heat exchangers and air cycle machines (which are basically turbocompressors driven off the engine bleed air) to compress the outside air for cabin pressurization.
Usually you want to avoid pressurizing using engine bleed air directly because it contains fuel and oil fumes.
Mans not wrong. This is why the early 707s used turbo compressors in some of the pylons, and the DC8 had those distinctive nostrils in the nose. It's kind of outdated, but this was true for a long time (the part about engine bleeds air being contaminated)
Also the 787 uses electric compressors to supply the cabin with outside air instead of engine bleed air since it has no bleed air system to begin with.
Air cycle machines are designed to cool and dehumidify bleed air before it is sent to the cabin. They don't mix in any ambient outside air, that is just used for cooling the heat exchanger.
This YouTube Short illustrates it, seems like it's just a pipe off of the compressor stage, before the combustion chamber:
https://youtube.com/shorts/-xzWHHsttsU
No, it’s a flock. A murmuration is a massive movement that is so thick it can blot out the sun. Happens a lot around harvest time. This was A LOT of birds!
If you've not heard of a murmuration of starlings before, you've likely not seen the wonder of their aerial ballet. It's one of the nature's most extraordinary displays:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0sE10zUYyY
Lmao yeah same here, I actually thought the thumbnail was bad quality and the birds were artifacts at one point. That is WAY too many birds on a runway. There’s usually stuff in place to stop that. I know some airports employ hunting birds to scare off other birds but WOW that was like 1000 birds just THERE. Unreal.
Thanks for sharing! Hey everyone, I filmed this on January 25, 2025. I just came across this Reddit page, my YouTube channel is SDF Plane Spotting. I love hearing everyone’s thoughts and opinions on this, thanks to whoever shared this!
Airport biologist here. Modern high-bypass turbofans can usually survive smaller birds going right through the motor with minimal issues. Large numbers of them may cause more problems. They'll definitely be doing borescope inspections and pulling feathers out of the blades for a while.
At least at my airport, all of our ingestions of smaller birds have gone right through with no damage done. Still ruins everybody's day though.
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I was getting rapidly downvoted initially - I think it came across as me being callous about the crew's safety, which was definitely not my intention, so I wanted to clarify that.
Excluding chickens. Their population is constantly increasing. They even outnumber us if I remember right.
Just be delicious and easy to raise and cull and your species won't go extinct.
My first thought while watching this video was the crash of ab Air Force Boeing E-3 Sentry that killed all 24 crew members.
From Wikipedia:
As the E-3 rotated, it ingested multiple birds(Canadian geese) into its number 1 and 2 engines. The crew started to dump fuel and initiated a turn to the left to return to the airfield, but with a full fuel load and having lost two engines on the same wing, it was unable to maintain altitude. After the aircraft reached 250 feet it descended and crashed into a hilly, wooded area, and exploded.
Man you must be so annoyed as one of those pilots. You sit around ages waiting for takeoff, then once you finally get off the ground you immediately hit a ton of birds and have to land again and wait even longer this time
Some have dogs [https://apnews.com/article/airport-dogs-birds-wildlife-plane-collisions-ee8ac514cd29ebc7889c33a3a4548faf](https://apnews.com/article/airport-dogs-birds-wildlife-plane-collisions-ee8ac514cd29ebc7889c33a3a4548faf)
One has a man for one particular species.
[https://www.massaudubon.org/news/latest/the-owl-man-of-logan-airport-norman-smith-s-legend-takes-flight](https://www.massaudubon.org/news/latest/the-owl-man-of-logan-airport-norman-smith-s-legend-takes-flight)
A murmuration that large is going to do what it wants as it has "protection" so it's focusing on other things. I can definitely see why nothing would have worked on that group.
can this play take off and go around just with the tail engine? or its too weak to climb and go around? and would only help if were airborne already to land?
|IATA|ICAO|Name|Location|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|SDF|KSDF|Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport|Louisville, Kentucky, United States|
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