True stories, not fantasy this time.
Imagine this. You are flying a commercial jet to Rhode Island, U.S., descending to land but still way up in the air – and your plane gets hit by a fish. That happened in 2000. A fish strike, a thousand feet up.
And what about this.
Back in the days of “Confrontation” when Indonesia embarked on a bizarre “invasion” of Malaysia. A few hapless Indonesian soldiers were caught trying to cross the Straits of Malacca. The coastal patrol boat that caught them put some personnel in their boat and began to tow them, invaders and boat and guards, to shore in Malaysia.
All of a sudden one of the Indonesians keeled over, dead.
There was a post mortem. A strange object was removed from the throat of the dead man. It was identified as the sharp snout of…a flying fish. Death by fish strike.
And the “flying” fish that hit the jet? Dropped by an Osprey.
Pix: an osprey taken by me at Virginia Beach.
Oh I can empathise with this story. One night, in North Carolina, we were out in the boat and the mullet were jumping. There were several boats and we ended up with 6 or 7 fish in each boat. I was hiding behind the windshields because when those suckers hit you, it hurt, you could have lost an eye very easily.
I can imagine a miffed Osprey being buffeted by jetwash and bombing the intruder in it’s airspace.