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[TCML] Chicken cannons



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?"
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