To Keep You All Amused

This is a bit of an old chestnut, but, in the absence of any intelligible noises from myself, why not?

Once upon a time, all the world's aerospace engine manufacturers were very concerned about bird strikes. Most people were installing turbofans on their airliners, and, as these are basically enormous turbo-charged, kerosene powered vacuum cleaners, there was (and is) a risk that they might suck things up apart from air.

Not only that, but the skies, of course, are awash with other things that fly. While there are no statistics on the accidental ingestion of fruit bats in jet turbines, there is plenty about flying a plane into a flock of birds. Some of them are going to go into the engine, and that spells trouble.

You might think that a high-speed fan coupled with burning fuel and superheated air would easily beat a duck in any fight, but then you'd be wrong. Every year, tragedy ensues when bird strikes occur. Turbine blades shatter and carve up the rest of the engine, causing it to fail, often in a ball of flame, and very often at critical moments... like take-off. And although most aircraft designs really do want to fly, they still tend to need all the engine power they've got when getting off the ground. Either that or a very, very long runway.

Anyhow, Rolls-Royce Aerospace were keen to figure out how to beat the problem, and so they devised a controlled test environment, which basically involved sticking the engine of the moment into a concrete bunker, running it up to operating parameters, and firing dead chickens at it from a compressed-air cannon.

The results of all this testing were very useful, and enabled R-R to minimise the risks. To demonstrate their contribution to air safety, they even distributed quite a bit of information about the programme.

Back in the US, General Electric decided to run their own test series, and asked R-R if it was OK to copy their rig, to which the response was 'yes', and consequently, R-R helped the GE guys to set it all up, and off they went.

Not too long afterwards, R-R received an agonised message from GE. The test results were relentlessly appalling. Every single engine configuration was being utterly destroyed in spectacular critical failures. Had R-R set them up? What was wrong? Surely, the Brits were either being fiendish, or had screwed it all up!

The white-coats at Rolls-Royce spent a short while chewing on the data, and then sent General Electric a three-word message:

'Defrost the chickens.'