Suwaneeguy said:
Mr. Mann kind sir, I can say from personal experience how wrong you are on what a pilot can see at a distance.
A quarter-century as a commercial pilot should give me a bit of experience. At approach speeds and as busy as an approach can get, I only have time to look for traffic that ATC has called out to me. As I said earlier, when we fly past a toy balloon 100ft away, we have maybe a fraction of a second to ID it as a balloon. There's no way that a pilot could reliably ID a drone near the A/C.
FWIW, we've hit birds that were bigger and heavier that the Phantom, usually there's just a smudge on the wing or tail. I've only flown prop A/C commercially, so I can't speak to turbines, but to become certified a jet engine has to survive a large bird carcass . A cannon uses compressed air to shoot chicken carcasses into the turbine at 180 mph. This is the approximate speed a plane would be traveling if it encountered a bird during takeoff or landing, when most such incidents occur. If the turbine disintegrates, or if the engine can't be operated safely for another twenty minutes after impact, the design fails the test.
A Phantom in the air intake may shut down an engine, prompting a landing, but it would be virtually impossible to make the plane crash.