Pilotage

Consider the names: The McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. The Dassault Falcon 50. Speedbird, the call sign for British Airways. And my personal favorite, the Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Lots of airplanes have been named after birds, for obvious reasons. With a few notable exceptions, like "Gooney bird," the birds chosen to represent airplanes are majestic, soaring creatures with impressive wingspans and superb flying skills.

I've often wondered why Cessna's vice president in charge of thinking up clever names for Cessna airplanes chose "Skyhawk" for the 172. Is there any kind of hawk other than the one you find in the sky? The dictionary lists the hawksbill, which is a turtle, and the hawkmoth moth; and the Hawkeye, which is a nickname for an Iowan- -but no Skyhawk. So I checked sky and came up with Skye Terrier, a cute little dog. No Skyhawk, though.

This is a good time to note that a Skyhawk is always a 172 but a 172 is not always a Skyhawk. The name Skyhawk was applied to 172s equipped with an optional avionics package. Note also that given the names of several other popular Cessna models — Centurion, Caravan, and Citation, for example — Cessna's VP/names obviously was not a birdwatcher.

The rest of us admire and maybe even envy birds. After all, they get to fly all the time, and for free. (However, they can't carry passengers.) We pay homage to birds' superior airmanship by naming some of our airplanes after them. And they appear to appreciate it. In fact, some birds take a real shine to airplanes. I know this because several keep setting up household in mine.

We are taught to check carefully during the preflight for signs of birds' nests, especially in the spring nesting season. Engine compartments are favorite campgrounds for birds, which can set up a comfortable domicile inside a cowling in a day's time.

Last year I bought some fancy red cowl plugs which I dutifully stuff into the nosebowl after every flight. They work like a charm, too. I've never found so much as a grass blade inside the cowl. That's because the birds have found even more inaccessable places in which to roost.

My friend Loy borrowed the airplane a few weeks ago and afterwards called me to report the bad news: a bird had penetrated the defenses and was lurking inside the airframe. Truth be told, the bird wasn't discovered until after Loy had landed at another strip and shut down. A friend walked over to greet him and heard a disturbance in the tailcone. The bird hadn't uttered a peep when Loy was preflighting, but apparently a 15-minute flight as the tail gunner was pretty exciting; the bird couldn't stop chattering away deep inside the tail.

A couple of weeks later I went out to the airport to prepare for a business flight, and as I made my way around the airplane I noticed a heavy concentration of bird droppings on the tail surfaces. Uh-oh. Sure enough, when I banged on the horizontal stabilizer, something immediately started fluttering around somewhere inside the tail. That bird sure did put up a commotion, too. I soon figured out why. It wasn't one bird, it was two.

I thumped noisily on the top of the stabilizer, and then the bottom, hoping to chase them out of one of the gaps in the structure. The birds skittered around in there but failed to show. I popped my hand along the vertical fin and the fairings between horizontal and vertical tails. More flittering and fluttering, but still no birds. I decided that the only way I was going to roust them was to remove the fairings.

It wasn't a big job, except that it was getting hot and I was in business attire. After pulling off one fairing, I started banging on the tailcone and, sure enough, a brownish-colored bird shot out and took wing. One down, one to go. The second one understood quickly the point of the exercise and within seconds was climbing away at VX.

I rolled up my sleeves and pulled out as much straw as possible, but it was impossible to get every last brown, brittle piece. With the fairings back in place, I wiped down the droppings as best I could and finally departed on my trip. Fortunately, the airplane enjoyed a quick shower in some scattered light rain encountered on the flight.

I've since addressed the problem with towels — the small, white, fluffy ones that I usually reserve for cleaning the plastic windshield with great care. Now they are stuffed in every airframe opening large enough to catch the eye of a small, determined bird intent on relocating from tree or bush to a real home, one with four aluminum walls and a roof. You don't realize how porous a small airplane is until you try to plug all those holes.

Now the airplane looks like a battlefield casualty with white tourniquets and bandages stuffed in here and hanging off there. All because of a couple of cowbirds — I think; I'm better at identifying airplanes than birds.

Cowbirds are known for depositing their eggs in other birds' nests and letting the surrogate parents do the tedious work of incubating until the eggs hatch. I'm not sure what they had in mind when they moved into my airplane. Come to think of it, the airplane's brown trim color matches the birds' own hue. Maybe they saw birds of a feather.