Was it searching for “carrion” luggage?
A Brazilian pilot was literally flipped the bird after a vulture crashed through his cockpit window and hung lifelessly in front of him for the remainder of the flight, as seen in wild footage.
“It was a close call!” the unnamed flyboy told Jam Press while recounting the wild incident.
The single-engine aircraft was ferrying five passengers from Envira to Eirunepé in Brazil’s Amazonas on Thursday, Dec. 5, when the jet was struck head-on by the buzzard, which ended up smashing through the windscreen.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
Footage taken post-crash shows the carcass-eater’s corpse dangling in front of the stunned pilot like a ghoulish dashboard ornament.
All the while, he can be heard explaining the avian aviation mishap to the people onboard.
Despite the freak accident, the composed flyboy managed to land the aircraft at Eirunepe airport sans incident while subsequent reports revealed that no one was “winged” in the crash.
“We thought we wouldn’t get out alive,” one of the relieved passengers said. “It’s a miracle the pilot managed to land with that right in his face.”
The steel-nerved aviator, meanwhile, suggested that the fowl incident might not have been as improbable as it appeared.
“This is the fault of the rubbish dump next to the airport, which attracts an absurd number of vultures to the area,” he declared.
Indeed, flocks of buzzards scavenging scraps from the dump pose a major risk to aircraft approaching the airport, according to local news reports.
This isn’t the first time a pilot has nearly been taken out by a featherbag inflight.
In June 2023, an aviator was flying across Ecuador when a massive bird smashed into the cockpit, bloodying his face like something out of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”
Some people suggested that the avian may have been an Andean Condor — essentially a supersized buzzard with a wingspan of up to 9 feet.