The Cannons Keeping Airplanes Safe, One Chicken at a Time

Each year, thousands of birds find themselves too close to an aircraft, unable to maneuver away and lose their lives on impact with a plane. In the past, crashes with birds have resulted in fatal accidents for passengers, so the aviation industry has looked into ways to test aircrafts’ ability to withstand bird strikes. Enter the chicken cannon: where bird carcasses from poultry farms are loaded into cannons and launched at aircraft components faster than the speed of sound to test if they can withstand the power of poultry. The Aerospace Research Centre of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Ottawa, home of four cannons, has a poster on the wall proclaiming the research facility as the "Home of the World's Fastest Chickens."

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