Jet engines must now be able to withstand the ingestion of an 8 pound waterfowl without failing (this is tested in the lab by firing a chicken from a cannon at point-blank range).
I just added that to my sig quotes file :-).
It's a funny article, lots of good quotes, although all are a bit morbid, of course.
And its not just birds. Sometimes jet-stream encounters can take a page from the X-Files. "We've had frogs, turtles, snakes. We had a cat once that was struck at some high altitude," said the Smithsonian's Dove. She says birds like hawks and herons will occasionally drop their quarries into oncoming planes. "The other day we had a bird strike. We sent the sample to the DNA lab and it came back as rabbit. How do you explain to the FAA that we had a rabbit strike at 1,800 feet?"
