A photographer captured the jaw-dropping moment a seagull smashed through the windshield of an $85 million fighter jet at a Spanish airshow in a sky-high scare that wasn’t even noticed by spectators below.
A Eurofighter Typhoon was performing at the June 15 event when it collided with a gull as it zipped over spectators at the San Javier Air Base, in Murcia.
Aviation photographer Javier Alonso de Medina Salguero snapped the four-shot sequence showing the moment the bird was hit and shattered the jet’s canopy, leaving a hole in the pilot’s windshield.
After the collision, the jet quickly landed and ended its routine — leaving Salguero and the rest of the spectators none the wiser until they heard about the details after the show.
“They reported over the radio that it had hit a seagull and broken the cockpit. Just then, I looked at the photos I had and saw the whole sequence,” Salguero told SWNS.
“When I looked at the photos, I was amazed to see the front of the cockpit broken,” he added.
It’s not uncommon for bird collisions to result in the damage of million-dollar planes or loss of life, with more than 270,000 reports of wildlife strikes to aircraft recorded between 2016 and 2021, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Of the incidents reported, more than 8,000 resulted in damage to the aircraft, the agency said.
The damage can be limited to a cracked windshield, but at its worst, bird strikes can have deadly results, such as last year’s crash in South Korea when a Jeju Air plane went down after a bird collision, killing 179 people.
