Quote:
Originally Posted by Revenant
It depends upon how robust your particular engine is. Early in my USMC flying career, we ingested a seagull shortly after rotating. Sounded horrible and looked bad on gauges, but 10-15 seconds later, after the engine had digested is "snack," all was good (except for the persistent stench of burned flesh and feathers in the bleed air/ECS...). After a precautionary landing, scope revealed no damage. Of course, it was an old school straight turbojet, with relatively short blades throughout, so much less vulnerable than current engines with big fans. Still, don't overreact -- there may be noise and exciting visuals at first, but give the engine time to finish "processing" the erstwhile bird -- then see if you have a problem.
In the “old days” at RND when I was a kid, they used to have a bat problem. The area has a lot of limestone, and abundant caves, and a super abundance of bats. When they would swarm in the evenings, the numbers were sort of unbelievable.
Generally the biggest swarms were near the parallel runway used by the T-38s. The T-38 engines (J-85s IIRC) weren’t really designed for carrying people at all, they were the old Bomarc missile engine. They would compressor stall on the slightest amount of FOD.
The T-37 engines, on the other hand, were primitive turbojets with a serious tolerance for FOD. And because their throttle response was otherwise so poor, even at “idle” they were operating at about 90% RPM with thrust limited by “thrust attenuators” that deflected the exhaust outboard. They were called “Tweets” because that caused them to constantly emit a shrill shriek.
So at the first sign of bats, one of the T-37s would be assigned to go fly a few patterns on the T-38 runway. Any ingested bats would simply become batburger (I don’t think maintenance even bothered with inspection after a few years of never finding any damage) and the shrill noise quickly chased the bats that survived away.