(no subject)
I mentioned this on Blogger, but I forgot to mention it here: I experienced my first birdstrike on Thursday afternoon. Erin and I had just taken off from Bisbee Douglas International and were only a couple hundred feet in the air, if that, when all of a sudden the plane shimmied a bit and Erin said, "I think that was a bird." Apparently a bird had struck the upper right corner of the windscreen. I was so intent on dealing with the turbulence that I didn't even notice it. Since we couldn't be sure the bird hadn't hit our prop before hitting the windscreen, we came back to the college and shut the plane down. There's always a slim off-chance that a birdstrike will ding your propeller sufficiently to create a risk of much greater damage. Erin inspected the prop and couldn't find any nicks or cracks. In fact, she couldn't find any evidence at all that we'd hit a bird. Then, when I was tying down the right wing, I noticed a bunch of blood on the front edge of the wing. That may well have been where our poor victim initially struck, but it should have been impossible for the bird to have then bounced up and hit our windscreen. It's an unsolved mystery, aviation-style.