In fact, at Boston's Logan Airport back in October 1960, a Lockheed L-188 crashed just six seconds after takeoff as a result of multiple bird strikes, from starlings, with the loss of 62 lives.
Wasn't long before the FAA began issuing Bird Ingestion Standards for turbine engines.
Nope, it's not part of a joke left over from Monty Python ("What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?"): the Chicken Cannon is real.
It's used to test whether jet engines comply with bird strike safety requirements.
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The Chicken Gun is designed to simulate high speed bird impacts.
It is named after its unusual projectile: a whole dead standard-sized chicken, as would be used for cooking. This has been found to accurately "simulate" a fairly large bird (as it actually is one).
The test target is fixed in place on a test stand, and the cannon is used to fire the chicken into the engine, windshield, or other test structure.
- from Wikipedia
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