Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
BAPTIST, Ark. — A Baptist Health Medflight helicopter made an emergency landing Saturday evening in St. Francis County near Widener after the pilot said he encountered a bird strike.
A pilot and two nurses were the only people on board and suffered minor injuries. None was taken to a hospital, said Mark Lowman, a spokesman for Baptist.
Lowman declined to release the names of the crew.
He said the helicopter made its emergency landing at 6:15 p.m. on a return trip from a burn unit in Memphis where the crew had dropped off a patient from Rebsamen Medical Center in Jacksonville.
The helicopter landed near Widener, said Arkansas State Police spokesman Bill Sadler.
Neither Sadler nor Lowman knew the exact location of the landing, they said.
A bird strike — when airplanes or helicopters collide with a bird or flock of birds — is the suspected cause of engine trouble for a US Airways jet that landed in the Hudson River on Thursday.
According to the FAA National Wildlife Strike Database, there were 506 bird strikes in Arkansas between January 1990 and August 2008. There were 97,061 bird strikes across the U.S. during that same time.