Bird makes huge dent in the nose of a Boeing airplane

The Boeing 737-800 is a 130-foot-long jet aircraft with more than 150 seats and a maximum takeoff weight of more than 70 tons. So what happens when that giant flying machine gets hit right in the nose by a bird? A pretty big dent, apparently.
This is exactly what happened to Turkish Airlines flight TK2004, a domestic flight from Istanbul to Nevşehir in Turkey on Tuesday. The plane was hit by a bird during landing, causing quite a bit of damage to its nose cone. The pilot managed to land successfully and none of the 125 passengers on board were injured.

 Flight review site Flight-Report first posted images of the damage to the plane, which at first glance looks unusually severe considering the plane struck a feathery creature.

But a Turkish Airlines spokesperson explained to Mashable that this sort of damage is not uncommon for an incident like this, since the nose of the plane is quite soft.
The nose cone "of a plane is being constructed by soft materials (composit) to minimalize the impact of such hits. Therefore, such standard/normal deformation occurs as a natural result of such incidents," Dr. Ali Genc, Turkish Airlines senior vice president of media relations, said in an emailed statement.
"The critical bird hits in aviation [are] the ones that occur on the engine area," Genc said. "Any other area of the aircraft than the engine area, such as [the nose cone], wings, hull and etc. are not [at] risk by bird hit.”
Many Twitter users were not convinced it was only a bird that hit the plane. Their guesses ranged from pterodactyl to a flying donkey.

Source : mashable