Birds

Last week’s crashing of a US Airways plane into the Hudson River in New York after (reportedly) colliding with a flock of birds brought back a memory for me.

Nothing quite as traumatic as what the people on this plane went through (who all survived without injury in case you have been living in  a cave for the last week), but I remember taking off from Prestwick Airport near Glasgow and getting quite a fright. I was sitting in the row behind the right wing and about 20 seconds after takeoff heard a bang and saw a fireball coming out the right hand engine. About thirty seconds after that there was a strong smell of burning in the cabin.

The funny thing was that only me and the guy sitting in front of me actually saw what happened and the two of us were trying to bring the fact the engine appeared to be on fire to the attention of the cabin crew without causing widespread panic. I think the guys exact words were “F***in hell, did ye see that? The engines on fire!”

After about one minute and thirty “hail mary’s”, the captain came on to tell us that he thought we had hit a bird and it had been sucked into the engine and we would be prepairing to land back at Prestwick. We had to fly around for 15 mins to burn off fuel and then land. I was very glad when we touched down safely.

We spent an hour and a half on the ground sitting in the plane while the engineers came and checked the engines and then we took off and completed the flight in the same plane without incident. Sitting in the prime position I could see everything the engineers were doing which manly consisted of shining tourches into the engine.

When they turned powerful lights onto the wing of the plane about 1/3 of it was covered with a paint thick covering of red goo which had once been either a seagull or a goose. Some poor engineering trainee had to come with a bucket and mop and stand on the wing and wash it off.