On October 4, 1960, Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crashed shortly after taking off from Boston's Logan Airport, killing 62 people and leaving 10 survivors. The plane, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, was carrying 67 passengers and five crew members when it struck a flock of starlings at about 120 feet above the ground. The collision damaged three of the four engines, causing a loss of power and control. The plane entered a spin and crashed into Winthrop Bay, marking one of the deadliest bird-strike incidents in aviation history. The starlings involved in the crash were part of a population that had been introduced to North America over a century earlier. In 1890, a man named Eugene Schieffelin, a pharmacist and member of a group called the American Acclimatization Society, released 60 starlings into Central Park in New York. His goal was reportedly to introduce all the birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. While this story is widely told, Schieffelin himself never confirmed the reason for the release. Regardless, the starlings thrived and spread rapidly across the continent. Starlings are highly adaptable birds with strong reproductive capabilities, allowing them to colonize new areas quickly. By the 1920s, they had reached the Mississippi River, and by the 1940s, they were found on the West Coast. Their range eventually covered an area about 15 times the size of France. However, their success has come at a cost. Starlings are known to compete with native birds for food and nesting sites, and they cause significant damage to agriculture, with annual losses estimated at nearly a billion dollars in the United States. The crash of Flight 375 led to important changes in aviation safety. In response, the Civil Aeronautics Board conducted tests to better understand the effects of bird ingestion on jet engines. They shot anesthetized starlings into engines to study the damage, a method that influenced modern testing procedures used to certify jet engines today. While the starling population in North America has declined slightly in recent years, with estimates now around 140 million birds, efforts to control their numbers have led to the annual culling of hundreds of thousands of starlings by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.