Delta 1352 Heavy

Bird strikes are the "hello world of aviation investigations." Bird strikes are the most studied aviation incidents dating back to the Wright Brothers. I try to fly out Monday morning and return Friday afternoon when I do business in San Francisco. When I wait too long to get my tickets, I sometimes have to buy a ticket with a stopover when all the direct flights are booked. While on this particular trip, I had a stopover in Salt Lake City. My status as a frequent flyer with Delta usually entitles me to an upgrade to first class. There were two first-class seats on the left and two on the right on this Airbus 220 flight. I think I was seated on the left in seat 4a, a window seat, during this flight. In less than 2 minutes after liftoff, I heard a loud thud on my side, the left side of the plane. As I turned to the passenger next to me, we both looked at each other and said, "that can't be good." The captain came over the speaker about 90 seconds later and said a duck might have hit the left engine and we would be returning to the airport. Over the years, I average about 150 thousand miles a year, and I've experienced several incidents in the air. I have made three emergency landings, two touch-and-goes, and one aborted takeoff as a passenger.

Being trapped in an 80-ton tin tub where you know something is wrong and have no control is not fun. I have logged over 3 million miles in my career, and I am still, to this day, a nervous flyer. The good news is that we landed safely at SLC, and no one was hurt, other than waiting for a few hours and, of course, the duck. Everyone, including myself, felt uneasy when we found out we would be riding on the same plane again. You often hear low voice chatter when boarding a plane. There is a lot of noise in the first class, and you can listen to the flight attendants talking about their trips and other things. Generally, in most takeoffs, you can hear many people talking. You could hear a pin drop during the second takeoff. The plane was quiet. As soon as the captain turns off the seatbelt sign and tells us that we can move around the cabin at 10,000 feet, I feel a little more secure. I felt the same way on this flight, where we couldn't get to that 10,000 feet ding sound fast enough. There was no chatter from the moment we stepped onto the plane to the time the ding sounded. Right after the 10,000 feet ding, the captain came over the speaker and said, "I'd like to say a prayer for the duck." The entire flight broke out in laughter, and we arrived in San Francisco a few hours late.

Note: I want to thank John Allspaw of Adaptive Capacity Labs for his mentorship on all things aviation, including his suggestion that bird strike is the hello world of aviation incidents.