Earlier this week, an American Airlines flight bound for Philadelphia suffered a bird strike not long after departure from Boston.
As we will come to explore in this piece, bird strikes do happen regularly and pilots are trained for this.
Without further ado, let’s get into it…
AA1146 – Boston to Philadelphia…
American Airlines flight AA1146 is a routine scheduled flight between Boston and Philadelphia.
The affected rotation involved in the bird strike was N762US.
As per data from Planespotters.net, N762US is a 23.4 year old Airbus A319-100 aircraft.
It originally started out life with US Airways in November 2000, before being handed over to American Airlines in December 2013 when the merger happened.
Furthermore, of the A319 variant, the U.S carrier has 133 of them in the fleet.
Within that 133, 122 are in active service and 11 are parked, hosting an average fleet age of 20.0 years.
AA1146 departed Boston at 1221 local time on March 20, and originally climbed out towards Philadelphia.
As per The Aviation Herald, the crew levelled off at 6,000 feet due to receiving a compressor stall in one of the engines.
Furthermore, the aircraft circled back to Boston, where it landed safely around 20 minutes after initial departure.
The safety outlet reported the captain announcement of a bird strike taking place on the flight originally bound for Philadelphia.
Bird Strikes Do Happen Often…
In conclusion, bird strikes do happen regularly, as we have seen with American Airlines flight AA1146 between Boston & Philadelphia.
Airports do what they can to reduce the level of activity of birds in the airport, but sometimes these collisions can happen higher in the air.
What is key to stress is that the crew still had one engine fully available, which enabled the safe return back to BOS.
At the time of writing (21/3/24 @ 1420 UK time), N762US remains grounded pending maintenance.
All eyes will be on how long it takes to repair the engine so then it can return to commercial service.
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