Absolutely Inbox

Does NASA or the FAA have a Chicken Gun they use to test aircraft windshields? Did they loan it to the British, who later had to be told to use thawed chickens? Uh, kind of, and maybe-maybe not.

It starts one of a few ways, such as this:

In an issue of Meat & Poultry magazine, editors quoted from “Feathers,” the publication of the California Poultry Industry Federation, telling the following story: The US Federal Aviation Administration has a unique device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at a plane’s windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies. The theory is that if the windshield doesn’t crack from the carcass impact, it’ll survive a real collision with a bird during flight. …

Or maybe like this:

This is true! Sometimes it DOES take a Rocket Scientist! Scientists at NASA built a gun specifically to launch dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea is to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl to test the strength of the windshields. …

And the punchline is: The FAA [or NASA] engineers had one recommendation: “Use a thawed chicken.”

(Another, older variant has a cat wandering into a loaded chicken gun and becoming part of the test.)

Okay let’s take a breath. It’s an interesting idea, and kind of funny, but is it true or is it a hoax?

There is, in fact, a chicken gun. (And probably plenty of others owned by other agencies.)

The USAF Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC)’s Ballistic Impact Range S-3 (“The Chicken Gun”) is used to determine the effect of impacts on, say, aircraft cockpits. Recently it was used to help NASA test impacts of foam on the Space Shuttle. For some previous stories on the Chicken Gun, see some articles on Army truck testing and tests against the Raytheon T-6A.

Whether the idea or “the gun” (which is really a test range) was loaned to the Brits is anyone’s guess.

Impact testing on the canopy of an F-16 Fighting Falcon.