Snarge.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who has made appearances here before, e.g. in 2014) has a most interesting New Yorker piece “How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough” (archived) that starts with bears used as product testers for bear-resistant containers and goes in all sorts of directions. Here’s the passage that brings it to LH: For as long as humans have flown, humans have flown into birds. Wilbur Wright survived the first avian strike; another early pilot, who might have thought it would be funny to surprise a flock of seagulls, did not. Few people are eager to rehearse an engine failure in midair. Presumably the same goes for the birds. The “bird ingestion test” is a classic example of a situation in which testers must operate under facsimile conditions. They rig up a hangar with a specialized cannon that shoots thawed bird carcasses into the blender of a spooled-up engine. The protocol has been formalized with great care. It begins with a single four-pound chicken, moves on to a…