With the congested airspace and constant rumble of jets, the airport is hardly a tranquil bird sanctuary. But Smith said the terrain resembles the Arctic tundra. It’s open, flat and barren, with water on three sides and plenty to eat, including waterfowl and small mammals....
“The importance of Norm coming in is that he helps us take out a significant threat to aviation safety, which is a large, dense-bodied bird on the airfield,” said Jeff Turner, the airport facilities supervisor....
I liked that phrase "dense-bodied bird." Googled it and found only one other iteration: "Think Turkeys Aren't Tough?" on Archery Forum ("i've had more broadhead damage caused and no pass through situations on turkeys than deer or bear. I've had 95 ke setups not pass through. They are a dense bodied bird).
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28 comments:
I prefer the spelling WOL for historical reasons.
Dense-bodied bird entryist the chat.
It's good to see someone who has found a job that the love where they can serve a very useful purpose.
About 3 months after Sully landed in the East River, my family and I were returning from Costa Rica and the plane hit a flock of geese coming into Newark Airport. Knocked out two engines; smoke and flashing lights in the cabin, lots of emergency vehicles lining the runway. Very scary! A great job by the crew to land without incident .
I am proud that my teenage kids remained very calm. That was an adventure I never want to repeat.
Aircraft and birds are a bad combination. Norman Smith is putting his love of birds to very good use. We need more Norman Smith's in the world.
Arctic raptor bad built butch bird dense-body.
I doubt that their bodies are all that dense. Birds are made out of meat and fat, same as the rest of us. But their bones are quite light, and there's a lot of feathers. I bet they float.
Is that where the expression "Tough Turkey" comes from.
And where is he releasing them? Those things can fly, you know. They can come right back if they like it there.
Or is that "Talk Turkey"?
In current dating terms, a "dense-bodied bird" is called "thicc" if my online information is correct. Please correct me if I've missed the point.
mikee said...
“In current dating terms, a ‘dense-bodied bird’ is called ‘thicc’ if my online information is correct. Please correct me if I've missed the point.”
I was thinking the same thing.
One of the early jet engine manufacturers, it may have been General Electric or Allison, I don't know, invented a device to test the resilience of their compressors after ingesting (that's the word) a dense-bodied bird at 200 to 300 knots, the typical climbout speed of the majority of turbojet aircraft.
Now, you don't want to conduct such test while in actual flight, because of the risk of crashing. The crash will cause lots of damage and what you want to learn about is the damage caused only by the bird. To do this properly, you conduct the test on the ground. Since its the relative velocity that's important, it's more cost-conscious to make the bird go fast than the engine, we have one of the least appreciated life-saving inventions -- the chicken cannon. Using compressed air, the chicken cannon launches cluckers at operating jet engines at up to and exceeding 300 mph. Ammunition for the chicken cannon (fastidious engineers prefer the term poultry projector) is fairly cheap -- less than one percent of the price of a KFC family bucket per shot.
Experiments conducted using the chicken cannon have revealed many interesting details about bird-ingestion. For example, in straight axial-flow turbojets producing in excess of 10,000 lbf, such as the GE J79, the effect is negligible in the average. However, in high-bypass turbofans, the type of powerplant most commonly found in commercial transports, there are vulnerabilities, especially in the case of very large birds that often fly in flocks, the Canada goose, for instance, the bird that brought down US Airways Fight 1549. Her Pratt & Whitneys happily devoured the first one or two, but it was the third or fourth honker that cooked FT1549's goose.
Typically, bird ingestions go by virtually unnoticed. In straight axial-flow and low-bypass engines, the whole bird is thoroughly minced by the compressor stages and then carbonized in the combustion chambers or in the reheat. However, in the case of high bypass ratio mills, the situation is more complex. If the bird encounters the engine near the center of the fan, the outcome is basically the same as in axial flow. Further toward the outer edge is more dangerous. The fan blades can become severely damaged, even broken off entirely, thus reducing engine output, perhaps fatally. That's very rare these days, thanks to the chicken gun, falconry, and enlightened wild bird population management with shotguns. Today, most air travellers experience bird strikes as the distinct aroma of fired chicken in the cabin.
I wonder how many federal crimes this guy is committing by trapping wild birds that look lovable.
bold off
How does he know what the people on the planes are thinking? Has the airport had an increase in rodents?
"Dense Bodied Bird" opened for "King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard" in Melbourne. The blokes in the front were dancing with some pretty dense bodied birds.
How does he hear the people taxiing on the plane over the engine noise? Is the owl able to hear them and convey their thoughts to him?
My flight got a bird strike flying out of Logan one year. Scary as hell! We heard a bang, and then the engine got shut off and it got really quiet. The guy next to me travels 300 days of the year and he was passed out asleep, but immediately woke up when he heard the bang and said 'uh-oh'. And the guy across from me started freaking out saying how he 'knew he shouldn't have taken this flight.'
Anyhoo, turned around and landed next to a strip full of firetrucks and ambulances. Fun times.
Dense-bodied birds,
You make the planes go down.
...the engine got shut off and it got really quiet... Anyhoo, turned around and landed next to a strip full of firetrucks and ambulances. Fun times.
Turning around is usually the worst emergency procedure in the case of losing an engine on takeoff. Making a landing somewhere ahead is vastly preferable. Without added power turning involves a loss of altitude, and if you're still climbing out, and have very little altitude to lose, such a turn invites a catastrophe. This is why the feds granted huge sums to many general aviation airports in the 1980s to improve their runaways so that large passenger transports could make emergency landings.
I had an old girlfriend I used to refer to as a dense bodied bird. I don't know what happened to her, but I was told she ran into some straight axial-flow and low-bypass engines.
Bah-dum.
@ 1:44
Well-played
“ Turning around is usually the worst emergency procedure in the case of losing an engine on takeoff …”
Your comment is completely wrong.
“In current dating terms, a ‘dense-bodied bird’ is called ‘thicc’ if my online information is correct. Please correct me if I've missed the point.”
Dense means more mass per unit of volume. For living creatures, this would mean a higher proportion of muscle vs fat. Keira Knightley or Natalie Portman would be dense-bodied. Or the Williams sisters at the height of their tennis careers. The obese gals euphemized as ‘thicc’ would not be.
JSM
Reminded me of a 2 year old PBS show about a Snowy Owl in SoCal
https://www.pbs.org/show/socal-snowy-owl/
Friend hit a turkey this week with her car. Damage estimate $2,700.
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