One big Plane, One little Bird

It started off as a nice sunny day in the Philippines. We loaded the plane and set off to drop some recon Marines out of the back of the plane. Everything went smooth and we got all the guys out of the plane and on the ground safely. We headed back to land and on touch down we started to smell a nasty burning smell. As it turned out we hit six little birdies and one went into the engine and exploded creating the smell.....

There is whats left of the little birdie that went into the engine.

This is a shot with the inlet guide vanes open so we could see how far it went into the engine. ( it turned out that it went all the way to the fuel nozzles and clogged a bunch of them up )

This is some of the guys talking about what we need to do to clean out of the bird guts. The picture I didn't get was of me pushed all the way into the intake to clean out what I could with rags. The intake is the hole directly under the propeller hub. The only thing sticking out was my boots. Its not a fun job.

Now its time to wash the engine out...Call in the fire truck!!!

This is Sgt Jones spraying water into the engine. It didn't do much to clean it out. Its kind of hard to clean exploded bird goo baked onto metal at almost 1000 degrees.

Ya it was a pretty eventful day.