A 1916 Bird Strike, the First Captured on Film?
Even against the backdrop of war, a bird strike was news. The Times said in 1916 that it believed this to be “the first photograph of the capture of a bird in flight by the swifter invention of man.”
The inevitable collision of aviation with the avian world has rarely — if ever — been illustrated as thoroughly and dramatically as it was last week. Thanks to news blogs and photo-sharing sites, images of the crippled US Airways Airbus afloat in the Hudson River were available almost immediately worldwide. But it was scarcely the first such encounter to have been recorded pictorially. Not by 93 years, at least.
A search of The Times’s photo archive brought to light the arresting image above, published on Oct. 1, 1916 — in the middle of World War I — with the following caption:
Remarkable French Official Photograph of a Hawk Overtaken in Flight by a French Military Aeroplane. The smaller bird of prey became entangled in the wires of the aeroplane and was held there until the machine came to earth. As far as known, this is the first photograph of the capture of a bird in flight by the swifter invention of man.
That was the beginning and the end of the story in the pages of The Times. Like Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III of US Airways, the French aviator managed to land safely. To judge from the picture, that hawk appears to have survived the encounter, too, which is more than can be said for the birds that ran afoul of Capt. Sullenberger’s jetliner. (City Room)