What happens when birds fly into plane engines?

You may be wondering: how often do birds hit airplanes? After all, planes are too big to miss. Unfortunately, every year, bird strikes cause up to $1.2 billion in damage to planes around the world through engine failures, crashes, emergency landings, and more. In fact, there are 16,000 bird strikes recorded each year in the U.S. alone.

The vast majority of bird strikes (97%) occur at airports during takeoff and landing. The rest happens at cruising altitudes with bird strikes recorded all the way up to 30,000 ft (9,000 m) above the ground.

Most bird strikes result from the animals being sucked into the plane by the aircraft’s gigantic jet engines. Sadly, these birds usually get shredded.

The real danger, however, comes from birds that are big enough to get stuck in the front fan. This can result in the halting of the operation of the plane’s engine. A fan blade can end up displaced into another blade, which engenders a cascading and terrifying failure.

What happens next? What is this terrifying failure? Is the plane actually in danger of collapsing? And what is the science, engineering, and technology that goes into preventing such incidents? We answer all these questions and more in our video.

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