Though quite rare, an aircraft colliding with a bird during flight, aptly known as BASH (Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard) or simply bird strike in the aviation industry, can be quite dangerous as this latest such incident in Indonesia shows.
Indonesian Ombudsman official Alvin Lie, himself a former pilot and aviation expert, shared the image above over the weekend, showing the aftermath of a bird striking the nose of an airplane belonging to Indonesian carrier Lion Air.
“The incident occurred at 6:58 Western Indonesia Time (on Saturday) to a Lion Air flight from Lombok to Surabaya while it was about to land on Runway 10,” Lie told Detik.
Alvin said officials suspect that the bird that collided with the nose of the airplane was of the long-legged freshwater-dwelling variety, like a stork or a heron.
Seeing the damage to the plane’s nose, it’s practically impossible that the bird survived the incident.
As for the plane, it landed on Surabaya’s Juanda Airport without further incident, and its nose was replaced by the ground crew soon after.
Lie said the plane was coming in at around 300 km/h during landing so it’s very possible that an external object as soft as a bird could cause such extensive damage. He praised the pilot for landing the plane safely after the incident, but stressed that commercial pilots are well-trained for such sticky situations.
Despite having its nose replaced, Lion Air said that the plane is temporarily grounded from flight.
It is estimated that a bird strike occurs, on average, 1 out of every 2,000 flights worldwide. Perhaps the most famous recent incident was the US Airways emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River due to a bird strike, which became the basis for the movie “Sully” starring Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart.
