Chilling.
This is a part of the report worth remembering:
“When encountering a vulture, the safest evasive maneuver is to gain altitude; since
vultures are heavy birds that are not very agile, they will normally try to avoid a collision
by descending.”
Instinctively – me at last – many pilots would descend to avoid a bird strike. I hope I remember this should I ever encounter such a large bird.
Interesting… I would and always do climb to avoid any mid-air.
Sometimes it doesn’t work; I had one at Zell am See and he climbed at +1000fpm too… Never saw him. But that wasn’t a bird – unless he was Mode C 
This is really an advertisement for an IR and oxygen…
There was an article in french magazine Aviation & Pilote last month about bird strikes and vultures. Instructive, a bunch of scary pictures. The advice was also to climb, vultures don’t flap, they will evade downwards. And if you hit anyway, there is less potential damage on the underside of the plane.
Peter wrote:
This is really an advertisement for an IR and oxygen…Not always, birds they had equipped with GPS loggers soared to 18,000ft, basically the first inversion that day.
I thought only an impact through the windscreen or in the engine could take the plane down. It’s a sizeable bird, but never imagined that a wing impact would cause part of the wing to sheer off. Very sad state of events.
Bobo wrote:
I thought only an impact through the windscreen or in the engine could take the plane down.
This impact had four times the energy for which Part 23 certification testing is required.
This was a very unfortunate accident. Usually there is a combination of factors that result in an accident. But in this case it was just bad luck.
I agree with Peter that IR and oxygen will reduce the risk of an enroute bird (or drone) strike. The risk won’t be zero but there are simply much more birds flying at 1000ft AGL than at 15K ft.
I appreciate it that the Spanish AAIB made the accident report available in English…
Interesting… I would and always do climb to avoid any mid-air.
As there was a lot of low flying military traffic in the 1970’s my flight instructor told me to push the control column when on a collision course with a fighter at a lower altitude -
those fighter pilots always pull because pushing could mean for them to hit the ground …
Feathered birds on the other hand let themselves drop – I had two birdstrikes in 35 years where I could observe that. Both went through the jet engine core – luckily without significant damage in one case – the other led to an aborted take-off with engine damage.
Chilling, but, as nearly always in aviation, a combination of factors. The pilot elected to fly straight through a concentration of vulture breeding sites at rather low level AGL. While flying higher may not have helped, offsetting would have. Spain has loads of sites with heavy avian concentration. The reasons for this are partly that it is – inland – a sparsely populated country with quite few nature reserves and partly that is sits on the main migratory route between Europe and Africa. These sites of bird concentration are marked on the charts, southern Spain is full of them. I have come very close to some big(ish) birds – mostly gulls along the coast – while flying there and they always dive away.
