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Goodfellow is in San Angelo, TX and is the DOD training base for intelligence services. Brooks City is in San Antonio and is a sleepy little base for Medical Research and training Flight surgeons. Bolling is where HQ USAF is. It's across the Potomac from Reagan National airport.

The Space bases are mostly new since 1990.

I've actually been to Arnold AFB, TN several times. The test facilities there are awesome including the "chicken cannon" which fires dead chickens at aircraft windshields to simulate bird strikes.

I want one of those Chicken Cannons!!

Good morning campers!

Just to throw a little relevancy into the frozen chicken thread, allow me to summerize my own personal experience in this field. My background: 32 years experience at NASA's Lewis Research Center in sunny Cleveland, Ohio.

Before my current foray in the microgravity field, I worked for many a year in our supersonic wind tunnels. During the early 1970s we had a project to test a "particle rejection system" for aircraft engine inlets. Translation: let the air in, keep the birds out! Actually, this test was a series of wires, or blades in the inlet which was supposed to reduce the birds to manageable size as I recall.

We set up a mock inlet in the 8x6 transonic wind tunnel and painted grids on the far wall for our high-speed 16mm cameras to track the hapless creatures.

Since we had high speed air flow, we didn't need a cannon. We designed and built a trapdoor system connected to the ceiling of the test chamber in the wind tunnel. Three birds could be stacked in a holding chute, with a separate trap door for each bird. On command, the trap door opened and the bird shot into the airstream, with a trajectory calculated to make it hit the engine.

I don't know who ordered the birds, but we got them from the Red Cross, believe it or not. There were different varieties of birds available, we got something like assortment A or B (the Red Cross' own terms, I have NO idea what they used birds for). They were pigeons and smaller birds like black birds or starlings. The birds arrived Fedex in styrofoam coolers on the days we needed them. We thawed them out, loaded the trapdoors and ran the tests.

Many problems. First, it was real hard to get the birds to hit the engine inlet, so most of them missed, only to impact the far end of the wind tunnel a short time later. The 8x6 wind tunnel is configured in a large rectangle about 100 yards long, with turning vanes at the corners. The birds didn't turn. You can imagine the mess. Well, no you can't.

Harold, our chief engineer, hasn't happy. The thawed birds were no good, he said. Too stiff. We needed fresh, and we needed them big. We bought ducks. We picked them up from a local farmer on the day of a test. To be humane, we snuffed them by putting their heads in a CO2 extinguisher and gassing them. Your definition of humane may vary. (To tell the truth, Harold, a farmer himself, just wanted to drop them live. To Hell with humanity, we were designing engines!)

Anyway, the freshly snuffed ducks brought a new problem. Upon hitting the airstream at 500 mph, they exploded! To be exact, all the feathers were plucked in a millisecond, resulting in a large cloud of feathers entering the engine. With their aerodynamics somewhat rearranged, the ducks usually hit the wall in the test section. Nice film coverage.

On one memorable day, we forgot to order ducks from the farmer. In a panic, the junior engineer went to the farm to pick some up. He got back an hour later an absolute mess. The farmer wasn't home and he had to chase down the ducks by himself. He managed to catch one or two, which he threw in the trunk of his car. It was a hot summer day. By run time (we ran on midnite shift to utilize cheap power) the ducks were dead in his trunk and as stiff as rocks. We dropped them anyway, after much folding and stuffing to get them in the chutes. Shortly thereafter, the program was cancelled.

A true story from the archives of NASA. I got a ton of'em. Guess I should write another book.

Denny Thompson

Goodfellow is in San Angelo, TX and is the DOD training base for intelligence services

My wife, FReeper Msdrby, spent several months at Goodfellow. I have been involved in Ham Radio for years. Occasionally, I'll explain something radio related to her, and get a comment like, "that was classified as far as I knew"

The test facilities there are awesome including the "chicken cannon" which fires dead chickens at aircraft windshields to simulate bird strikes.

Does PETA know about this OUTRAGE?