Making Sure Engines Win in Aerial Battles With Birds

If a jet engine can’t stand up to a 2.5-pound duck, its manufacturer has a multimillion-dollar turkey.

Airplanes sometimes hit birds, and one or two sucked through a jet engine can cause disaster if it can’t keep working.

This means the world’s top jet engine makers must perform some gory testing to make sure the inevitable confrontations between bird and airplane will be fatal only to the bird.

It may sound crude, but experts say there is just one perfect way to do this: Fire carefully weighed dead birds into running engines and then check for damage.

The trials are called “bird ingestion.” Pratt & Whitney tested its new PW4084 engines with both a big bird, an 8-pound turkey, and four 2.5-pound ducks. The bird carcasses are shot through an air cannon into the spinning engine blades.

A slow-motion film of the larger bird shows the carcass flying toward the blades, which slice it into seven pieces as the engine consumes it. After the ducks are shot into the engine at about 170 miles an hour, tufts of feathers blow out the back.

The company obtained birds that had died of natural causes at poultry farms, spokesman Mark Sullivan said. As long as the birds are humanely killed, the practice seems to raise concerns only among the most vocal of animal rights activists.

“Anything that reduces the number of air accidents has got to be a good thing,” said Derek Niemann, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in England.

Even as jet engine makers use different design philosophies, they seem to favor different types of birds.

GE Aircraft Engines tried out its GE90 engine on a herring gull. At Rolls-Royce in England, humanely killed ducks are fired from the cannon at the Trent series of engines, a spokesman said.