My first proper Bird Strike!

Tuesday Morning my first day back flying after 4 days away I have my first incident where I have to fill out a incident report.

I was on final approach for Runway '18' at Zanzibar for my first landing of the day, when suddenly out of the waste high grass that surrounds the runway at Zanzibar airport (There must be a skill shortage for qualified grass cutters in Zanzibar) a large heron (bird) took flight. I doubt it bothered to look before it took off let alone had a clearance from control.

Anyway here was me in a caravan with Fourteen people on board almost about to touch down.....Bang!! The poor Heron went through the propeller giving the aircraft a mighty jolt and spraying the left hand side of the aircraft in blood. Seconds later I touched down taxied off the runway, informed the tower, shut down the engine and then called operations to let them know what happened.

I couldn't see any visible damage, but wasn't going to risk flying until the aircraft was inspected by an engineer. Whilst I waited for an engineer to be flown over from Dar es Salaam in a Cessna 206 and I enjoyed a bottle of flat Coke (wasn't turning out to be my day) the fire brigade pulled up with the remains of the bird from the runway threshold.

After two hours of sitting around, the propeller was deemed ok, there was no bird bits inside the turbine compressor, all the Caravan needed was a wash and she was good to go.

In Botswana I saw the terrible damage after striking large birds in small aircraft such as Vultures and I was lucky to get away with just a delay of my next flight by two hours.

The next day involved satisfying TCAA (Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority) with a incident report.....I think the heron was in the wrong....though a environmentalist would probably say I was in the wrong for invading its natural environment or something like that.

Later that day of the bird strike I got to be entertained by a rare spectacle that only occurs one week a year in Dar es Salaam the Tanzanian Airforce fighters fly. The clapped out old Shenyang J-5's, which are copies of the Russian MIG-17's. I once owned a Chinese motorcycle for my first six months in Tanzania it broke down all the time, so believe me you would have to brave or stupid to fly one of those aircraft. The Airforce fighters fly this one week a year to practice for a fly by on the 26th of April for the celebration of the Union between Zanzibar and Tanganyika which in part created Tanzania (don't quote me on that).

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