Having experienced a few near misses and seeing others that were not this is a rather telling video from aopa using fs flightsim to demo:Captain Sully may have gotten the most pr but it happens more often than the news reports...http://flash.aopa.org/asf/pilotstories/birdstrike/birdstrike.cfm

Just a heads up everyone. Requires an AOPA login! Great story, BTW.

Interesting story, and useful info there about the spare glasses, gonna remember that one. Cheers for posting that.Just to kind of balance things up, funnily enough, one of the best experiences I ever had in an aeroplane was with a bird, it was when I was thermalling in a glider. Normally you tend to look for birds circling when searching for lift, as it's a good clue to where the lift is, but on this occasion, a bird actually flew over to me and joined me in the turn in the thermal I had found which was a good one with plus 9 all the way around and the variometer wailing away like crazy, so the pair of us were going up like a rocket.My feathered companion was a big seabird of some kind and it was literally right outside the canopy on the right side. If it hadn't have been for the perspex, I could have reached out and touched its wing it was that close to me, and it stayed perfectly in that position turning with me for about five or six orbits around the thermal. I remember watching it make tiny adjustments to the shape of its wings and the feathers at the back of them to stay in the turn, and I was kind of matching them on the stick and rudder and using it as a visual reference. You can't buy an experience like that, it was really magical.Al

........Just to kind of balance things up, funnily enough, one of the best experiences I ever had in an aeroplane was with a bird, it was when I was thermalling in a glider. Normally you tend to look for birds circling when searching for lift, as it's a good clue to where the lift is, but on this occasion, a bird actually flew over to me and joined me in the turn in the thermal I had found which was a good one with plus 9 all the way around and the variometer wailing away like crazy, so the pair of us were going up like a rocket.My feathered companion was a big seabird of some kind and it was literally right outside the canopy on the right side. If it hadn't have been for the perspex, I could have reached out and touched its wing it was that close to me, and it stayed perfectly in that position turning with me for about five or six orbits around the thermal. I remember watching it make tiny adjustments to the shape of its wings and the feathers at the back of them to stay in the turn, and I was kind of matching them on the stick and rudder and using it as a visual reference. You can't buy an experience like that, it was really magical.Al

Remarkable experience. Its the type of thing that can only happen with a glider.

Remarkable experience. Its the type of thing that can only happen with a glider.

Or a microlight to be fair to Bill Lishman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_LishmanAl

Only bird strike I ever had was in a helicopter. It whacked the bottom of the windscreen, but did not shatter it.However, it did get lodged into an air intake (luckily just vent air for the cockpit) and remained stuck there like a hood ornament until landing.

My flying partner had a different kind of experience with a bird. When we first got xm weather he was flying in Louisiana with his wife at 10,000 ft. and saw a one pixel yellow dot on the screen. His course went right thru it and he thought it must be an error and flew into it. He entered some pretty bad turbulence and rain and at that moment some bird poop splattered all over the windshield.Some bird must have been sucked up there and been pretty frightened!