The bird that struck Mayor Bloomberg’s private jet nearly crippled the landing gear and forced the pilot to declare a emergency, according to documents obtained The Post.
The official report belies Bloomberg’s claim yesterday that there is “nothing to say” about the harrowing incident.
Shortly after takeoff from a Hamptons airport on Saturday, the “large bird” slammed into the nose landing gear, the FAA documents show.
The damage was potentially so severe that the pilot radioed to a central control tower that he had an emergency.
He wanted the Boston-area airfield, where he was bringing the mayor and friends to attend Ted Kennedy’s funeral, to be prepared for the worst.
“[Bloomberg’s jet] requested emergency vehicles because they struck a bird while taking off,” the control-tower supervisor at
the Boston airfield wrote in the FAA incident report.
The pilot then “requested the tower to check if the gear was down” as the plane buzzed overhead for visual verification. The tower reported that “the gear appeared down,” and Bloomberg’s $27 million Dassault Falcon 900EX landed without incident.
The bird’s kamikaze attack came not long after the city’s execution of hundreds of Canada geese.
The mayor had joked that gassing the geese “and letting them go to sleep with nice dreams” was a cheap way to rid the airways
of the kind of birds responsible for taking down US Airways Flight 1459, which made a miraculous safe Hudson River landing in January.
Yesterday, the mayor was in no joking mood about his brush with death.
“There’s nothing to say,” the mogul, who has three Dassault Falcons, said. “A bird hit a plane. Birds hit planes in the New York area 400 times a year.”
Also on board the plane were his girlfriend, Diana Taylor, Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, and former UFT President Randi Weingarten. All but Bloomberg, a licensed pilot, were kept in the dark about the danger.
“I think nobody knew,” Weingarten said. “It didn’t feel scary when it happened.
We were all talking about Ted Kennedy.
“We knew when we saw the fire engines that something was going on,”
Weingarten said.
david.seifman@nypost.com