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Flying in the Time of Cicadas
Over the weekend the crew of a Challenger 350 at John C. Tune Airport (KJWN) in Nashville, Tennessee, was having difficulty starting its engines. "We put a borescope down the APU and found it full of cicadas. They blocked the airflow." Cicadas are not terribly selective, and they were apparently attracted to the noise and heat of the APU and piled into the inlet, blocking the airflow. When the technicians evaluated the problem, they were attacked by the swarm. (www.flyingmag.com) More...
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Going to need to plug up everything before you put the airplane to bed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Attacked by cicadas! Almost as dire as neing tazed by ligntning bugs.
"The aircraft was hooked up to an auxiliary power unit (APU)." That makes it sound like it was an external power source. APU's are often found inside the aircraft. Just saying.
They can actually be External or Internal, but common day the APU is normally onboard the aircraft, but that is not the Golden Rule.
I hit a swarm driving that the window washer couldn’t keep up with. I had to pull over, scrape, and wait. I imagine an aircraft on takeoff or landing could suffer the same fate.
This is love bug season in central Florida. There isn't enuf washer fluid to get them off cl. Need to use the scraper. Why didn't they just cover the engines?
Come for the meth, stay for the hordes of insects.
That’s exactly what I was thinking of. We took a trip through East Texas once where I had to stop a number of times to clean the love bugs from the windshield.
