One Man’s Pest

The plane had just landed when the unmistakable smell of smoke began to waft throughout the fuselage. As the aircraft taxied on the runway of São Luís’s Marechal da Cunha Machado airport, the passengers on LATAM flight 3419 fidgeted in their seats. A minute earlier, they had heard a loud whacking sound, followed by a sudden crack, coming from just outside their windows.

A bird had lodged itself within the plane’s turbine during takeoff, impeding the rotation of its fan and cracking its shaft. Within seconds, the entire turbine ceased functioning. From a distance, residents of São Luís took photos; they later recounted the sight of thick smoke flowing out of the plane’s engine.

“I saw a vulture fly right into the turbine,” claimed one bystander. “And then it was like, poof, all black smoke!”

Modern planes, and push-button pilots, make it possible to glide a compromised fuselage back down to earth, and flight 3419 was no different: the aircraft touched back down on the runway only fifteen minutes or so after it had first embarked for bluer skies.

The incident would be registered by Infraero, the body that administers Brazil’s main commercial airports, as an official bird strike. Bird collisions are a near constant threat to the aviation industry, and Brazil is the site of a disproportionate number. In 2019, the country recorded almost 2,500.

The unfortunate creature involved in the bird strike on flight 3419 was a black vulture (Coragyps atratus), a carrion feeder that pilots and air traffic specialists have long considered a collision threat given both its size and flight behavior. Of Brazil’s animal-aircraft incidents in 2020, for instance, more than 20 percent involved vultures of one species or the other; eight percent involved black vultures. They are truly everywhere, it seems, singing “then destroy[ing]/the night/one flutter/at a time,” as poet Lawrence Welsh once put it.

Even discounting