BIRD STRIKE!!

Okay, so this kind of stuff happens on occasion. Areas like MKK and JHM are prone to having their fair share, perhaps more, of birds in and around the vicinity of the airport. Flying into these birds does happen. Most of the times when it does, it really a non event. Meaning that the bird takes a glancing blow either off the aircraft body or at times strikes the props and gets turned into a "flash of crimson".
 But today was a little different. During the crew walk around after landing in MKK they discovered this:

The F/O was looking in the intake and found the feathers and a small blood trail leading into the intake.

So they checked the engine intake bypass and found this

(GRAPHIC PHOTOS...LOOK AT YOUR OWN RISK!!)

So, we got a birds carcass in the intake, but did ANY portion of the bird get sucked into the engine? Well, now we in dispatch pretty much ground the aircraft on MKK and get maintenance control to send an mechanic and inspector out to the aircraft on the next available flight to check. FOD or Foreign Object Damage is a serious matter and is treated that way at EVERY AIRLINE!

Two hours later...after a thorough inspection, the aircraft is released by maintenance and we can now re-dispatch the aircraft from MKK back to HNL to finish the remainder of the line, albeit 2 hrs delayed!

As for our feathered friend, well this is all that maintenance found of him...

Not much left. Not even a cat would want this as a snack!

The best thing was that no one was hurt. The plane landed safely and we didn't have to replace an engine. Even after this happened, the station's customer service was already rebooking passengers and trying to minimize the delay they would experience.

Unfortunately these things do occur and the crews are capable of handling it and the maintenance staff is capable of getting the aircraft back flight ready.