Travelling by air is one of the risky ways of travelling, and the one major way of surviving plane travel is as long as the pilot keeps to safety measures. Most times, pilots can’t be blamed when there are plane crashes. Some natural occurrence is way beyond their control and happens suddenly.
For example, how can you explain a case where there is an airstrike?
Just like other means of transportation, planes encounter issues while travelling on air. One of them could look like the moment a plane encounters a strange object in the air. Does this ever happen? The answer to the questions is yes!
Another common strike plane experience is bird strikes. They are relatively common, and their impact can be severe. This plane, for example, flew through a flock of small birds. That plane was lucky it only hit small birds. The birds obviously weren’t that lucky. Meanwhile, a big bird could cause damage like this. Imagine the damage a small flock caused; imagine if they were bigger ones.
While birds are the most common objects hit by planes, they aren’t the only ones. Now, what would happen if an aeroplane hit a bird in the air?
Here are the things that will occur when an aeroplane has an issue like this while on air.
- An aeroplane hitting a bird in the air can be best imagined as a linear collision problem.
- Consider the average bird weighing about 1-2 kgs (minimum) flying at about 10-15 km.
- Now consider a commercial airliner, which at a low altitude of about 3000 ft, acquires a velocity close to 200 knots, which is about 360 km.
- Now a head-on collision with a bird, disregarding all possible sad-seen sentiments for the bird, is a problem of a collision involving momentum transfer.
- The bird collides with a random part of the aircraft, and due to relative velocity, the bird is like a 2kg object striking a stationary airliner at about 370-380 km. That’s about 105m/s, and hence assuming that the bird doesn’t rebound from the airliner and remains attached to the fuselage, a maximum force of 210 N acts on a relatively small part of the aircraft.
- Bringing in the strength of materials, this kind of collision is classified as an ‘impact’ and has a stressing effect which is twice the effect of the situation wherein a load of 210 N is slowly applied to the small area of the fuselage.
- From this, we can understand that a bird hit is very similar to taking a bullet.
- Now if the bird hits the relatively sensitive parts like the tail or the elevator, you have a screwed-up control surface which could be very serious.
- If it hits a projecting pitot tube, you may have screwed up instruments.
- If it, however, hits the engines, it can cause engine failure in the worst case, and in the best case, the bird may be chopped up by the compressor, burnt to ashes by the turbine, and released as a gas through the exhaust, causing damage nevertheless.
- Bird strikes in the early stage of takeoff can be fatal, with very less altitude and speed to make a recovery. The same goes for landings, although aircraft travel relatively slower for landings.
Conclusion
Do objects hit planes while flying in the air? Yes. However, the most common challenge planes experience is that of birds hitting a plane while en route on air.
