[TCML] Chicken cannons

[Jason Goodman]

On Dec 6, 2007, at 8:55 PM, Clive Hansen wrote:

> Chicken guns are used to test bird strikes against aircraft. The gun  
> is aimed at an aircraft window.  Then, the chicken is shoved down  
> the barrel in a sabot. A giant butterfly valve is then opened which  
> sends pressurized air shooting the chicken out of the barrel. I used  
> to have something like this for shooting potatoes using air pressure.

Chicken cannons are also used to test aircraft *engines*, which need  
to be designed to survive bird "ingestion".  Somewhere I saw some  
amazing high-speed photography of a whole chicken passing through the  
intake fan of a running jet engine.  Perfect chicken slices, but  
presumably they didn't last long once they passed through to the  
stator blades of the compressor.

And just in case you haven't heard it, the classic "chicken cannon"  
urban legend: Supposedly, the designers of a high-speed train wanted  
to make sure the front windshield of their new locomotive could stand  
up to bird strikes.  So they talked to NASA or whoever, who lent them  
a chicken cannon.  But no matter what they did, on every shot the  
chicken shattered the windshield to smithereens.  After a bunch of  
testing, they complained to the NASA guys, who replied, "did you  
defrost the chicken first?"