A JetBlue flight bound for Florida ran into a bit of a messy goose problem as it took off from Westchester County Airport last night. Two geese flew straight into the plane's windshield (or the plane flew straight into them, depending on whose side you're on) as flight 571 went up at 6:52 p.m. Fortunately no geese hit the engines, but "out of an abundance of caution" the pilot immediately turned around and brought the plane back in for an emergency landing. (Here's audio of the communication between the pilot and control tower.) As you can see here, some workers were assigned the unenviable task of cleaning all the geese guts off the windshield.
"The birds were flying across the runway at the time," Jeremy Nielson, operations supervisor at the airport, tells NBC New York. "I think the pilot said at about 300 feet, they struck the birds." The 54 passengers were put on another aircraft which was expected to get them to West Palm Beach by midnight. "I was petrified," passenger Janice Hilbrink tells the Post. "Seriously very frightened. I heard the noise. It was very loud and the plane had a lot of turbulence. The pilot told us the windshield was cracked... The whole front of it was covered in bird."
Like at LaGuardia and JFK, geese are a constant menace at Westchester County Airport, which is located by a lake. Steve Garber, a biologist who used to manage the wildlife program for Port Authority, tells the Post, "It’s on a lake, and the grass that’s there — it’s crawling with geese. They have all these wetlands right on the airport, and nobody seems to care."
This geese incident comes less than a week after another plane taking off out of JFK was forced to make an emergency landing after geese flew into one of the engines. A passenger on board the flight happened to be recording video out the window as the plane took off, offering a rare glimpse at the exact moment when GEESE ATTACK.
