From the start, the flight looked like it would be a good one: The plane was on time, we left on time, and the estimate with the winds was that were going to arrive early. It was, sadly, not to be. As we were climbing over San Francisco there was a slight drop in power from the engines and the plane leveled off. At fist, I didn't think much of it since the bay area is a crowded airspace and maybe we needed to level off to allow for other traffic.
However, then we turned east and started heading to Sacramento, I started to have my doubts. Pretty soon we were headed towards San Jose and it was pretty clear that there was something wrong. After about 10 minutes, the captain came on and told us that we hit a bird and that his controls were not working correctly...
...but that the First Officer's controls were fine (Maybe lead with that next time!). The pilots had the plane under control and set us down in Oakland with about 20-30 minutes of total time in the air. Emergency responders were out ready to great us if something went wrong, but the landing was smooth and we taxied into the gate on our own power. Everyone on board was calm about the situation, if a little annoyed at having plans abruptly changed.
What actually happened is that the bird took out the Pitot tubes, which are important for a lot of different functions on the plane, including air speed indication and supplying information to the engine controller. The Air France crash in 2009 into the Atlantic was attributed to a malfunction in the Pitot tubes. Thankfully, there was another undamaged set on our plane that kept everything running smoothly.
