It's 7 am. Friday morning and I'm standing in line at the KCI Airport. I was supposed to be on a 6 a.m. flight to Georgia. Unfortunately, a bird smashed into the plane's wing, causing a catastrophic chain reaction that forced the airline to cancel the 6 a.m. flight just minutes before take-off.
After an Amazing Race-like dash to the ticket counter and a call to a helpful ticket agent, I'm trying to catch the 7:40 a.m. flight to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then on to Georgia.
When I left the ticket counter, I assumed I had a reserved seat on this flight and the next one, too. Now, the crowd in line around me insists that I do not. The guy behind me tells me none of us are going to make this flight.
"Do you have a boarding pass from Cincinnati to Savannah?" he asks, accusingly.
In fact, I do not.
"See," he says, "the airline knows you're not going to make this flight, so it's not giving you a boarding pass for the next leg, so it can give that seat to someone else, someone who IS going to make the flight."
Annoyed, I quickly turn around and focus on the guy in front of me, a Boy Scout leader who's supposed to take 30 kids backpacking later that night.
He tells me that the bird hit the plane last night at 11. "Why didn't the airline call us and let us know the flight would be canceled?" And then, "That must have been some bird, because they test the wings with frozen turkeys."
I picture a Boeing being bombarded by Butterballs and am immediately suspicious. I am in line with a crowd full of turkeys, I think to myself.
But this is my crowd and this is what they're sharing. Even though they have no reason to lie, I still feel the need to do my homework. And that's the thing with crowd-sourcing: ultimately, someone has to tell fact from fiction, truth from tale, rumor from revelation. And that person, when it comes to journalism and news, is a professional journalist, with the time, talent and expertise to do the heavy lifting.
You can't just take the crowd at face value, as I quickly learn during my airport affair. I do get onto the flight to Cincinnati and the one to Savannah, too, much to the dismay of the "negative Nick" who insisted I wouldn't.
And the turkeys? Well, that's not true, either. Go figure.
There are several turkey and aircraft stories being confounded here. As your link does point out, engineers did at one time have a "chicken cannon" that fired warm birds at aircraft to test windshields. I may have even used that as an example in science writing of getting the good stuff into your story.
There is another story, part pop culture and part urban myth, of a radio station that, as part of Thanksgiving promotion, planned to throw live turkeys to a crowd below from a helicopter. Unfortunately, domestic turkeys can't really fly and they ended up bombing a crowd with warm, live turkeys that exploded on impact. That was a plot of an old "WKRP in Cincinnati" episiode. (Always liked that show. Wonder if I could get it on Netflix?)I have heard colleagues in broadcasting insist that the turkey bombs actually did happen. Can't verify that, tho.
Finally there was the spread of turkey bowling, which used frozen butterballs in place of bowling balls. This recreation ran afoul of animal rights activists in the early 2000's and I haven't heard much about it lately.
I hope your Thanksgiving trip to Atlanta has fewer turkeys on it. Wave as you fly over Cincinnati.
Thankfully, I'm staying in town for Thanksgiving.
So I guess the troll with previous comment got edited out?
Hmm, that's strange. I approved that one before I wrote mine. My comment doesn't really make much sense without yours. Perhaps, I can find it and re-approve it.
On a side note, my husband (who has degrees in engineering and physics) tried to convince me that the turkey tale was true also. It seems to me that pelting a plane with frozen poultry doesn't make much sense. I would think you would want to include the wing thrust, etc. in your calculations. But hey, that's not my field (or area of expertise). I also wasted several minutes arguing with the telephone ticket agent over whether the bird actually hit the wing or the engine. She insisted it had to be the engine, because it didn't make much sense for a bird to fly into a wing. As I don't know the flight patterns of birds, I had no idea which was right. I just knew that my Boeing bird wasn't going anywhere, regardless of where the actual bird hit it.
Tom Volek does insist that the turkey helicopter drop actually happened. I have my trusty sleuth assistant, Carlena, checking this out on the urban myth internet sites.
Birds getting sucked up into engines, especially big ones like geese, certainly can bring an airplane down. They break off the fan blades in the jet engines and then the blades tear up the rest of the stuff inside.
At http://radio.about.com/blwkrpturkey.htm it says that the turkey drop in WKRP was loosely based on a real event. Back in 1946 (maybe 1945) Yellville, Arkansas inaugurated the "Turkey Trot Festival" which included a wild turkey calling contest, a turkey target shoot, a Miss Drumsticks Pageant and, oh yeah, a live turkey release from the roof of the courthouse. After a few years, someone thought it might be fun to actually toss the poor gobblers out of a low-flying airplane for the event. This went on for a number of years until 1989 when a national animal-rights protest cast the event in a bad light and the "National Enquier" splashed a photo of the event across the nation forcing promoters to abandon the turkey drop. The site does NOT say whether turkeys can fly or not.....
You probably shouldn't tell a white-knuckle plane passenger that a mere goose can bring an aircraft down. Just saying.
Suddenly, I'm feeling sorry for the poor gobblers. Perhaps, I should return the turkey I bought for Thanksgiving? Or maybe I should just toss it off my balcony at a hapless passerby?
Heidi, your blog was a bright spot in my day. Turkeys launched at a plane? Something's afowl.