Canada geese – J’accuse!
* Here’s smoking-gun evidence that the feathered fiends who plague our grassy lawns and golf courses are also threatening the lives of airplane passengers departing La Guardia, Kennedy and Newark airports.
The jet engine buried in the muck of the Hudson River for eight days after the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 contained evidence of a bird strike – including a feather that survived the river’s currents, investigators said yesterday.
National Transportation Safety Board probers yesterday released a photograph of the feather, which suspiciously bears the gray-black coloration of a Canada goose.
Organic material and feathers found in the plane’s wing, fuselage and right engine, which stayed attached to the plane, had earlier been found to be bird remains.
It will be up to experts at the Smithsonian Institution’s feather lab to determine for sure that the bird remains were in fact from Canada geese.
But the probers’ findings so far are consistent with reports by hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles, that the plane struck birds on takeoff from La Guardia Airport on a flight to Charlotte, NC.
The Airbus A320’s left engine, which fell from the plane as Sullenberger skillfully ditched in the Hudson on Jan. 15, lay on the river bottom until Jan. 23. A team of police divers, US Army Corps of Engineers experts and crews from Weeks Marine in Jersey City then pulled it from the drink.
Experts seeking evidence of what happened in the crash pulled the engine apart – and immediately noticed by a visual inspection that the engine had some suspicious dents and showed “evidence of soft body impact damage.”
That was just one clue that birds were involved.
An NTSB-supervised teardown of the engine at its original manufacturer, Cincinnati-based CFM International, brought more damning feather-and-entrails evidence against the hated honkers.
Investigators are ruling out other possible problems with either engine.
They found that US Airways had properly maintained them, and had upgraded them in line with an airworthiness directive issued by the Federal Aviation Administration in December.
NTSB probers have also checked a report that the plane’s right engine suffered an engine surge on Jan. 13, two days before the accident. The engine recovered from the surge, and the plane’s flight continued uneventfully.
It turned out that surge was caused by a faulty temperature sensor, which US Airways replaced before the flight.
Flight data recorders “revealed no anomalies or malfunctions in either engine up to the point where the captain reported a bird strike,” the NTSB said.