Birdstrike caught on camera from the flight deck 😳

You gotta be really reckless to not see or hear a giant plane coming your way

We're Flying out now

Damn lucky it happened during the landing approach and not during takeoff...😲

Was this at least held until the birds’ next of kin were notified?

Just before impact:

Was on an HH-3F once when we struck a brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana. We were flying at 500’ AGL and 120KIAS off the coast of Louisiana and the creature was in a steep dive. We spotted it just prior to contact with our right sponson and subsequent illumination of Master Warning and Hydraulic Fluid Pressure warning and Main Land Gear warning lights. All four crew members, pilot, co-pilot, radioman in jump-seat (me) and crew-chief at cabin door all witnessed it prior to the strike and the crew-chief and I saw it strike rhe sponson, tear off a large hunk of it and then the carcass (or large part of it) fly up and through the rotor head leaving blood and entrails all over the side of the helo. We all saw the same thing and before I called a mayday as we autorotated to the sea below, correlated that ID. “Was that a large brown dog that fell from the sky above?” “Yes!” “That’s what I saw!” Agree.” “MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY, This is Coast Guard helicopter 14xx, position Nxx.xx.xx Wxxx.xx.xx, 4 souls on board, midair collision with large brown dog at 500 ft, MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY” Honest to our Lord, above. I sent that mayday. We were able to inspect the helo on the water and air-taxi back to base and then managed to land on jacks as we had lost our right landing gear. The impact with the large dog which fell from space (we thought another plane at the time) ripped part of our right landing gear completely off and it was lost to the Gulf of Mexico. It was good fortune that our pilot was our unit’s Engineering Officer and thought of this unique solution to our plight, saving our aircraft or the use of a cradle which would have been much more difficult to rig. It was hours later when someone realized, actually our Fish and Game guy, that the “fur” on the plane, was actually feathers. And that we had hit a huge brown pelican. Actually an endangered bird. We could well understand why.

This perfectly demonstrates the human element that sully was speaking about all those years ago, boom, oh crap / other … assess and land the plane

I once hit a deer while driving. I think it was my first hunt.

How's the bird doing?

Sometimes God uses airplanes to bring his animals home