Ground animals on a runway are a nightmare for pilots. Usually, when we think about foreign object debris (FOD) or wildlife ingestion, images of geese or seagulls hitting a windshield come to mind. But a rabbit strike plane engine fire is a terrifyingly real scenario that has grounded multi-million dollar aircraft and sent emergency crews racing across the tarmac. It sounds like a fluke. It isn't.
Animals like rabbits, hares, and even coyotes are frequently drawn to the wide-open spaces of airfields. They like the grass. They like the lack of natural predators. But when a jet engine, spinning at thousands of RPMs, sucks in a five-pound mammal, the physics are unforgiving. It’s not just about the impact; it’s about what happens to the internal delicate machinery of a turbofan when it’s forced to "process" organic matter it wasn't designed to handle.
The Mechanics of a Rabbit Strike Plane Engine Fire
The engineering behind a modern jet engine is basically a miracle of metallurgy and thermodynamics. Air enters the front, gets compressed, mixes with fuel, ignites, and shoots out the back. If a rabbit gets sucked into that intake, it hits the fan blades first. At takeoff speeds, those blades are moving faster than the speed of sound.
Sometimes the "bird strike" (the industry term often used for all wildlife) results in the animal being bypassed—shot out through the outer cooling duct. That’s the "lucky" outcome. The unlucky version? The carcass enters the core.
When organic material hits the high-pressure compressor, it can cause "compressor stall." Think of it like a backfire in a car, but a thousand times more violent. The airflow is disrupted, and the flame that is supposed to stay inside the combustion chamber suddenly licks out the front or the back. This is often where the rabbit strike plane engine fire begins. It’s not always a sustained fire of the engine itself, but a series of surges that look like a flamethrower to anyone watching from the terminal.
Real-World Incidents and the Cost of Damage
In 2013, a Virgin Australia Boeing 737-800 taking off from Mildura had to abort because of a rabbit. It wasn't a fire in that specific case, but the vibration was so intense the pilots thought the engine was vibrating off the wing. More recently, airports in the UK and the Midwestern United States have reported spikes in "lagomorph" (rabbit and hare) incursions.
The FAA’s Wildlife Strike Database is a sobering read. While birds make up about 97% of reported strikes, "terrestrial mammals" account for a significant portion of the most expensive damages. Why? Because a rabbit is dense. Unlike a small bird, a large hare has enough bone mass to shatter titanium fan blades. Once a blade snaps, it becomes a projectile. It travels through the engine casing, severs fuel lines, and—boom—you have a fully developed rabbit strike plane engine fire.
Why Airports Are Basically Giant Rabbit Cafeterias
You’d think fences would stop this. They don't. Rabbits are elite diggers.
Airports offer thousands of acres of perfectly manicured short grass. To a rabbit, an airport is a five-star resort with no foxes and great visibility. Most major hubs like O'Hare, Heathrow, or Schiphol spend millions on "wildlife mitigation." This involves everything from specialized fencing that extends several feet underground to "pyrotechnics" (basically loud noisemakers) used to scare animals away before a flight departs.
Some airports have even experimented with changing the type of grass they grow. They look for "endophytic" grasses—stuff that tastes bitter or makes the rabbits feel slightly sick so they decide to lunch elsewhere. Honestly, it’s a constant arms race between aerospace engineering and evolution.
What Happens Inside the Cockpit During a Fire?
If you're a passenger, you hear a loud bang. You might see a flash of orange outside the window. In the cockpit, it’s a flurry of activity, but it’s surprisingly controlled.
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- The Fire Warning: A loud bell or a repetitive "FIRE, ENGINE NUMBER ONE" voice alert sounds. The master warning light flashes red.
- Throttling Back: The pilot flying maintains control of the aircraft while the "Pilot Monitoring" identifies the affected engine. You don't want to shut down the wrong one.
- The Fire Handle: This is the big one. They pull the fire handle, which mechanically cuts off fuel, hydraulics, and electricity to that engine. It isolates the fire.
- Extinguishing: If the fire light stays on, they rotate the handle to "blow" the fire bottles—canisters of Halon gas that smother the flames.
The plane is designed to fly perfectly fine on one engine. Even a heavy 777 can climb and land safely with one side shut down. The real danger of a rabbit strike plane engine fire isn't usually the plane falling out of the sky; it's the secondary damage caused by shrapnel or the stress of a high-speed rejected takeoff (RTO).
The Hidden Complexity of "FOD" Investigations
After an incident, the NTSB or its local equivalent doesn't just take the pilot's word for it. They go looking for "snarge." That’s the actual technical term for the biological remains left in an engine.
Forensic labs use DNA sequencing to figure out exactly what was hit. Was it a Black-tailed Jackrabbit? An Eastern Cottontail? This data is vital. If an airport knows they have a specific rabbit species problem, they can tailor their trapping and fencing programs. If a certain engine model is consistently catching fire after a strike while another model just gets a bit dented, engineers go back to the drawing board on blade containment shields.
We’re talking about a massive financial impact here. A single engine overhaul after a wildlife strike can easily top $2 million. That doesn’t include the cost of cancelled flights, passenger hotels, and the psychological toll on a crew that just had to perform an emergency evacuation on a taxiway.
Misconceptions About Engine Ingestion
A lot of people think jet engines are like vacuum cleaners that suck everything in from miles away. Kinda true, but mostly not. At idle, you have to be pretty close to be sucked in. But at takeoff thrust? The suction zone—the "danger egg"—extends significantly in front of the cowl. A rabbit darting across the runway 20 feet in front of a spooling engine has almost zero chance of escaping the intake vortex.
Another myth is that "screens" could be put over the engines. This comes up every time there's a viral video of an engine fire. The problem is that at 500 mph, a screen would restrict airflow so much the engine would lose half its power. Plus, if the screen itself breaks or gets iced over, the engine sucks in the screen—and then you have a guaranteed catastrophic failure rather than a possible one.
How to Stay Safe and Informed
As a traveler, there’s zero you can do to prevent a rabbit from running onto a runway. However, understanding the reality of aviation safety helps manage the anxiety.
- Pay attention to the briefing: Know where your nearest exit is. If a fire occurs and an evacuation is ordered, leave your luggage. People die in fires because they try to grab their laptops from the overhead bins.
- Trust the redundancy: Modern twin-engine jets are ETOPS rated, meaning they can fly for hours on a single engine over the ocean. A fire on the runway is scary, but the plane is built to survive it.
- Check the stats: If you’re a data nerd, you can look up the FAA Wildlife Strike Database. It’s public. You can see which airports have the most "terrestrial mammal" incidents.
The reality of a rabbit strike plane engine fire is that it represents the collision of nature and high technology. We’ve built machines that can touch the edge of space, but they can still be brought down by a five-pound herbivore with bad timing.
Actionable Steps for the Industry and Travelers
- Airport Authorities: Invest in "perimeter integrity" audits. A fence is only as good as the dirt beneath it. Trenching and "hardware cloth" buried two feet deep is the only way to keep burrowing mammals off the active pavement.
- Engineers: Continue the push for "soft-body" ingestion resilience. We've made massive strides in bird-strike resistance; applying those lessons to the higher-density impacts of ground animals is the next logical step in engine casing design.
- Passengers: If you see an animal on the taxiway or runway while the plane is moving slowly, tell a flight attendant. Pilots have a limited field of vision directly in front of the nose wheel. Your "eyes on the ground" could actually prevent a localized disaster before it starts.