This week started off pretty uneventful- until Tuesday evening. I had my stage 4 commercial check that day (which I thankfully passed). After doing commercial maneuvers in the practice area, the check pilot and I headed back to the Council Bluffs Airport. On our way back, we were flying somewhat low since we had just finished some ground reference maneuvers. We were about 1,000 feet off the ground when a fairly large white blur just barely missed our left wing. Initially, I thought it was a bird. But then hundreds of other white, blurry pods started flying through the air. I had no idea what was going on. I realized pretty quickly that they weren't small birds. My check pilot then said "Wow, I have always heard about this happening, but I have never once seen it with my own eyes". He then went on to explain that they were hundreds of SPIDERS migrating through the sky in clumps of dense spiderwebs.
This phenomenon is called ballooning spiders. Each pod was about softball sized. Spiders use their silk to migrate through the sky in small clumps. As much as I wanted to take a photo of the hundreds of spiders in the sky, it probably would've been frowned upon during a stage check. Once we landed back at the airport, the plane had quite a few spiderweb clumps on the surface- YUCK!
Sharing the sky with hundreds of migrating spiders was the last thing I would've expected to experience during my stage check this week. Aviation never fails to surprise me every once in awhile. At least now I have a cool (and gross) story to share!
Here is a link to a news story about ballooning spiders in Texas.