The amazing way this Israeli pilot survived a birdstrike

An Israeli pilot only known as "Lt. H" was flying at a low level near 350 knots in an A-4 Skyhawk one day. He was flying over the desert near the Dead Sea in September 1985. He was flying straight and level when the next thing he knows he is laying on the floor of the valley near where he was previously flying. All he knows is that he has a massive headache and no memory of how he got there.

Eventually, H did remember seeing a small object coming at him at a high speed. As he approached, he instinctively ducked to avoid hitting the object, but to no avail.

"I couldn't tell what it was,'' he told the New York Times. ''As it got closer, instinctively I ducked. That's all I remember. I woke up on the ground with a parachute around me and my neck broken.''

His command knows exactly what happened – he ran head-on into a migrating flock of birds. One of those birds penetrated the canopy and flew into the cockpit, then hit H in the head, knocking him unconscious. What happened next was nothing short of miraculous.

This wasn't an ordinary bird, it was a Honey Buzzard.

The Israelis found H laying in the desert, as H remembers. But they also found feathers and blood on the helmet of their young IDF lieutenant. They sent the evidence to a lab in Amsterdam to get some answers. That's how they discovered what kind of bird the Skyhawk hit and how it was able to break into the jet's canopy. It turns out Israel in the 1980s was smack-dab in the center of a migration corridor for storks, pelicans, and predatory birds like the Honey Buzzard.

It turns out the bird crashed through the front windshield and eventually hit the pilot's ejection seat lever after knocking him out. Lieutenant H's parachute opened on its own, and that's how H ended up on the ground with a headache.

The bird, however, probably went down with the Skyhawk.