From Jon Kessel
A story in your booklet brought back memories (Bizarre tales from New
Scientist, 21 March, p 45).
In the 1970s, I worked for Hawker Siddeley at Hatfield, where the company was
finishing production of the Trident passenger plane and work was well in hand
with the HS-146 (now known as the RJ-100).
We were required to test the resistance of windshields to bird strikes, so I
was dispatched to the local supermarket to buy a number of frozen chickens.
These were fired by a pneumatic gun into the windshield. I often wondered what
the results would have been had we not defrosted the chickens.
Needless to say, as an apprentice I was given the task of cleaning up after
the tests.
Advertisement
jonk@zetnet.co.uk
