When you spend many years and trillions of dollars developing a new fighter jet, you need want to make sure one unlucky bird getting sucked into an engine turbine won’t bring the whole plane down.
A bird (or a drone) striking an aircraft’s windshield or getting stuck inside the engine can be very dangerous, especially if the aircraft is in the midst of an aerial operation. To make sure every military aircraft can withstand a random assault of confused birds, engineers have the pleasure of chucking dead chickens and turkeys at their own projects. Often with cannons.
Here is the controversially expensive F-35 getting its chicken treatment. Enjoy as the impact splatters poultry meat across the windshield.
This is the F-16 suffering an impact from what looks like a giant exploding meatball.
Here is another F-16, which is just taking off when a real bird gets sucked into the engine and botches the entire flight.
And last but not least, this is a slow motion video clip of what happens inside the engine when a bird, alive or deceased, ends up inside.