First of all, let me say that I don't know if this story is
true. But it's so fucking
ludicrous...
The Federal U.S. Aviation Administration set a webpage describing one of his more ingenious devices. It was a device to test the resistance of the glass of the of airships and consisted of a tube that shot a dead chicken to the windshield of the airplane. The firing was exact and reproduced the speed with which the bird would reach the airplane in flight. Theoretically, if the windshield resisted the test of impact, then it certainly would support a collision with a bird in a real flight. Actually, the device worked perfectly, with hundreds of tests conducted in the USA.
Engineers of the RENFE (Spanish train company) who were developing a new high speed train found the website and were instantly interested in the “chicken cannon”, thinking about applying the idea to test the windshields of its new hi-tech train in final phase of project. They entered contact with the US-FAA, obtained a lent cannon and they came to carry out tests. Already in the first shot, the chicken burst the frontal glass of the train, broke the panel of instruments and the chair of the engineer, hurt two technicians and flew until the bottom of the locomotive, crashing in the back wall and leaving a deep hole in the plate. The Spaniards were completely perplexed with the surprising and violent result. They documented the scene in detail, they produced digital photos, they recorded declarations of eyewitnesses, they drafted technical documents and they sent all the information to the US-FAA via email, asking what was what they had done badly. The American technicians studied the received documentation carefully and responded, in a dry and direct email:
"UNFREEZE THE CHICKEN”