Near bird strikes, 4th in two months, bird tornadoes..etc

My old skipper when I was in VT-7 took a 2 oz sparrow down the intake doing night FCLPs. Engine promptly disenegrated at like 100' AGL on the touch and go. Every light in the cockpit lit up, and him and the opso punched out. Landed a few hundred feet from the fireball, and I think he said he spent the next 7 hrs in the ER getting pieces of MDC surgically removed from his eyes and face. Yay T-45. Then there was the krock dude back in the same timeframe that wasn't wearing his visor when he took a flock of birds and ejected. Never flew again due to the injuries.
 
///AMG said:
Then there was the krock dude back in the same timeframe that wasn't wearing his visor when he took a flock of birds and ejected. Never flew again due to the injuries.
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I guess some debris from the ejection and a rapid onslaught on high pressure air hitting his face all of a sudden?
 
My buddy flying an E-2 took multiple bird strikes in both motors during night FCLP's, lost the first one and paddles waved them off. It's night and all he saw was a fireball and the Hawkeye go low so he hit the lights. As they waved-off, lost the second motor, ditched in a field with the plane breaking in two. Some injuries to all three on board.
 
Okie_Pilot said:
I guess some debris from the ejection and a rapid onslaught on high pressure air hitting his face all of a sudden?
Click to expand...

The T-45 doesn't blow the canopy off in a tradional sense when you eject. It has a ghetto hand operated open/close mechanism (when compared to any other pointy nosed jet I can think of), and it isn't rigged to jettison. So it has this horrible "mild detonating cord" (MDC) that was apparently pulled straight from the harrier, but not reengineered to account for the smaller, flimsier canopy material. So basically, it is overkill, and it rains shards of molten lead all over your face and body when it does its thing and blows the canopy up around you. I don't know how the community has faired as of late, but when I went though, it was a sticking point, particularly because we had all just started flying with the horrible horrible horrible (can I say it one more time....horrible) combat edge mask, that was basically the cheapest bidder kind of thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't seal off your face when used in conjunction with the standard visor. It works fine for a custom cut JHMCS visor that you get later in the fleet (though it is still a horrible mask), but with the stuff you fly with in the training command, it leaves a big gap between the mask and the visor, which needlessly exposes your face and eyes to the shrapnel from a T-45 ejection. Did I mention it is a horrible mask?
 
Last few ejections, mild injuries due to the lead and only if sleeves were rolled up or visor was up.
 
In the last 24 hours, I've come closer to more birds than I ever have. I've only ever hit one (on the after landing roll in Yuma — poor bastard was filleted and shoved forward by the reversed props in a cloud of feathers—really, you must see it, it is somewhat interesting to behold), but I sure came plenty close on the last seven legs.
 
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