One of the most important events during an aircraft's service life is the impact of a bird (ie, bird strike), which could possibly lead to catastrophic failure. According to airworthiness authorities, compliance of an aircraft structure to bird‐strike certification specifications can potentially be proved by simulation. In the present work, combined experimental and numerical investigations are performed, aiming to provide a validated numerical simulation tool for the certification of a composite leading edge structure. To increase the numerical simulation efficiency, the stacked shell approach in the frame of the finite element method is adopted. Comparison of numerical and experimental results shows that the proposed methodology is very promising for the simulation of impact events on complex composite structures. The proposed methodology has been applied for the development of a numerical tool for the simulation of bird strike on a composite leading edge structure.