A helicopter that was supposed to be on its way to Texas spent Wednesday on the ground in Rotterdam, after a reported strike with a turkey vulture forced an emergency landing in a field.
WRGB reported that a source at the scene said the aircraft had come from the New Hampshire-Maine border and stopped to refuel at Schenectady County Airport. While departing, that source said, it hit a turkey vulture at 1,500 feet. The bird moved right as the helicopter moved left, then spiraled into a rotor blade.
A Tip Cap and a Minute
The same source said the bird broke the rotor blade's tip cap and the helicopter began to shake. The crew found a field and landed about a minute later.
As of WRGB's Wednesday report, the crew was waiting on spare parts and planned to stay locally overnight. The Texas leg, for the moment, awaited spare parts. WRGB described the aircraft as a 60-year-old military helicopter repurposed to fight wildfires across the country.
The Altitude Helicopters Already Use
Fifteen hundred feet is not an exotic slice of sky for this kind of flying. AIN Online attributed to the FAA the finding that 90 percent of bird strikes occur at or below 3,500 feet above ground level, the band where helicopters operate most of the time. Rotorcraft, the report said, often work where bird activity is densest: low altitudes, coastlines, waterways and landfills.
A January 9 NTSB operations-group factual report included a section on helicopter operators' bird-strike mitigation.
That canvass was not about this crew, and Wednesday's local account did not turn a shaking helicopter and a quick field landing into an official finding. It did put a wildfire aircraft and a turkey vulture in the same working layer of sky, with the next move waiting on parts rather than a departure for Texas.
