Yes, bird strikes can and have caused plane crashes, though the vast majority do not. Of the 305,813 bird strike reports collected by the FAA between 1990 and 2024, only 53 resulted in a destroyed aircraft. That’s less than 1 percent. But when a strike does bring down a plane, it’s usually because birds were ingested into one or both engines at a critical moment during flight, overwhelming the systems designed to handle exactly this scenario.
Why Most Bird Strikes Don’t Cause Crashes
The numbers paint a reassuring picture. Out of those 305,000-plus reported bird strikes over 34 years, 59 percent caused no damage at all. Another 3 percent caused only minor damage. Just 1 percent resulted in substantial damage to the aircraft. The reason is partly physics and partly engineering: most birds are small, and modern aircraft are built to absorb a significant amount of impact.
Every jet engine sold for commercial aviation must pass bird ingestion tests before it can be certified. For the largest engines (those on wide-body jets), the standard requires surviving a single bird weighing up to 3.65 kilograms, roughly 8 pounds, fired into the fan blades at 200 knots. Engines must also withstand flocks of smaller birds, with tests simulating up to 16 birds at once for smaller species. These tests don’t guarantee the engine keeps running perfectly. They guarantee it doesn’t throw debris into the fuselage or catch fire in a way that endangers the aircraft.
When Bird Strikes Become Dangerous
The danger spikes when the birds involved are larger than what the engine was certified to handle, when multiple engines are hit simultaneously, or when the strike happens at low altitude where pilots have almost no time to react. Nearly all bird strikes happen during takeoff and landing, when planes are closest to the ground and flying through altitudes where birds concentrate. Final approach alone accounts for about 8 percent of strikes at military airbases studied in one analysis, with the climb phase adding another 1 percent.
The most famous example is US Airways Flight 1549 in 2009, which struck a flock of Canada geese shortly after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, losing thrust in both engines. Captain Chesley Sullenberger glided the Airbus A320 onto the Hudson River, and all 155 people aboard survived. That incident illustrated both the real danger of bird strikes and the role of pilot skill in preventing fatalities.
More recently, in October 2021, an Airbus A320neo ingested a bald eagle into its right engine during takeoff at Atlantic City. The bird’s mass exceeded the engine’s certification standard. A fan blade broke on impact, ruptured a fuel line, and the leaking fuel ignited. The crew rejected the takeoff and evacuated on the runway. In South Africa in 2022, a Jetstream 41 propeller hit a Kori Bustard during landing. That bird, Africa’s heaviest flying species at up to 19 kilograms (42 pounds), shattered a propeller blade. Debris punctured the passenger cabin, though no one was seated in the damaged section.
The Physics of a Bird Hitting a Plane
A bird doesn’t need to be large to deliver a punishing blow at flight speed. Impact force depends on both mass and velocity, and commercial aircraft move fast. Simulations using an 820-gram bird (about 1.8 pounds) showed that at roughly 250 knots, the peak impact force on an engine fan blade reached 218 kilonewtons. That’s nearly 49,000 pounds of force from a bird that weighs less than a bag of flour. At higher speeds around 490 knots, the same bird generated forces up to 359 kilonewtons. When a bird strikes the root of a fan blade, where the blade meets the central hub, the impact is most severe and the risk of catastrophic blade failure is highest.
A bird’s body behaves almost like a fluid on impact at these speeds, spreading across the blade surface in milliseconds. The orientation of the bird matters too. A bird tilted at a 45-degree angle horizontally transfers the most energy to the fan, causing kinetic energy losses as high as 64.73 kilojoules in simulations. That’s enough energy to significantly slow the engine’s rotation and potentially stall it.
How Pilots Handle Bird Strikes
Pilot training for bird strikes focuses on one core principle: avoid making a bad situation worse. If a bird strike occurs on final approach, the standard guidance is to continue the approach and land. Going around means climbing back through the same airspace where the birds are, at low altitude, with potentially damaged engines. The risk of a second strike during a go-around is often greater than the risk of landing with existing damage.
If a pilot spots a flock ahead during approach, the calculus is similar. Unless the crew is confident they can climb away without flying through the birds, continuing to land is generally the safer choice. During takeoff, the decision depends on speed: if the plane hasn’t reached the speed where it’s committed to flying, the crew can reject the takeoff. Once airborne, they follow the same damaged-engine procedures used for any engine failure.
How Airports Try to Keep Birds Away
Airports use a layered approach to reduce bird activity near runways. Habitat management is the foundation: eliminating standing water, mowing grass to specific heights that discourage nesting, and removing food sources like berry-producing shrubs. Many airports employ wildlife biologists who actively patrol the airfield, using pyrotechnics, laser deterrents, and trained birds of prey to chase flocks away from runways before takeoffs and landings.
Radar technology is a newer addition. Airports including Chicago O’Hare have tested avian radar systems, which use marine-grade X-band radar to detect and track bird movements near the airfield. The technology works best for larger birds and flocks at higher altitudes within about 5 kilometers of the radar. In testing at O’Hare from 2011 to 2012, the radar systems tracked only about 15 percent of birds and flocks that ground observers confirmed were present, suggesting the technology still has significant limitations as an early warning system. It’s more useful for identifying seasonal patterns and high-risk time windows than for real-time alerts.
The Cost to Aviation
Bird strikes cost the global aviation industry an estimated $1.2 billion per year in direct damage and flight delays, a figure the USDA considers conservative. That works out to roughly $64.50 per commercial flight when spread across the entire world fleet. The costs include engine repairs, airframe inspections, replacement parts, and the cascade of delays and cancellations that follow when an aircraft is pulled from service. A single engine replacement after a severe bird strike can cost several million dollars, and the aircraft may be grounded for weeks or months. In the South Africa propeller incident, the aircraft sustained damage so severe it required a complete structural assessment of the fuselage where debris had penetrated.