Times-Union readers want to know:

A friend sent me a "true story" from Meat and Poultry magazine that said that the Air Force uses this super cannon to hurl a chicken at airplane windshields to test their strength. Is that true?

The most common of the variations of the email is that British engineers (other versions just say an unnamed foreign country) wanted to borrow the chicken gun to test the windshield of a new locomotive. Engineers loaded up the chicken, blasted it and were stunned when the windshield shattered, the bird broke the engineer's seat, then embedded itself in the wall of the cab.

The email claims that the British asked the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate to see if everything for the test was done correctly. The FAA reviewed the test and, according to the email, had one recommendation: "Defrost the chicken."

Funny but not so farfetched.

This story did appear in Feathers, the California Poultry Industry Federation's newsletter. According to Snopes.com, the publication picked it up but did not check whether the incident actually happened. Snopes.com also points out that now retired Army Lt. Gen Wesley Clark told the story as true on various occasions and used the anecdote in many of his speeches, probably lending credence to the legend.

Yes, the chicken gun is real - although the emailed story is probably apocryphal.

The information website About.com quotes Randall Watt, project engineer at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) at Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee, as saying that the need for the chicken gun surfaced during the Vietnam War, when aircraft with terrain-following radar flew at high speeds at only a few hundred feet off the ground. It was during these flights that pilots encountered thousands of bird strikes each year.

The Air Force assigned the Aeronautical Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, to address the bird impact hazard. Engineers at Wright-Patterson and the AEDC developed the idea for the chicken gun. The mechanism was constructed using scrap hardware, About.com reports, using information from military sources. The first shot was fired in the U.S. on Sept. 14, 1972, at an F-111 escape module.

The poultry test is part of a series of stress tests required by the FAA before a new jet engine design can be certified, Snopes.com reports. The test takes place in a huge concrete building, where the engine goes at full speed and the cannon uses compressed air to shoot chicken carcasses into the turbine.

Although dead chickens were used for many years, the Air Force, sensitive to animal-rights activists, now uses birds made of clay and plastic. The Air Force did use frozen birds before switching to fake ones, Snopes.com reports, so the legend of the story and its punchline isn't all that unreasonable. The idea was that if a plane's canopy could survive an impact with a frozen bird, then it could certainly survive a collision with a live bird flying under its own power. There's no indication, though, that the "thaw the bird" missive from the FAA happened.

Regardless of the story, Snopes.com and About.com agree that the email's upshot is self-serving - making the point that American engineers are far smarter than those of other countries who can't understand why the chickens they're using keep breaking their most impact-resistant windshields.

Carole Fader: (904) 359-4635