Slashdot Mirror
The Tech Behind Preventing Airplane Bird Strikes
the4thdimension writes "CNN is running an article covering the technology used at Sea-Tac for preventing airplane bird strikes, like the one that occurred weeks ago to the now famous Flight 1549. The hardware used ranges from low-tech pyrotechnics, to netting, to lasers, to avian radar. Using a combination of all these technologies, Sea-Tac believes they save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in avoiding dangerous bird strikes."
We just need to build a fence to keep these Canadian terrorists out. Migrating, my ass.
Always fly over rivers wide enough to land on!
Then you'll get bird plus titanium wire in the engine instead of just bird.
There just isn't a material strong enough. Any structure that would reliably keep the birds out would be unaccepetably heavy and would restrict air flow.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The secret to preventing bird strikes is to constantly gauge their needs and demands. As long as you regularly meet those needs without giving in too much, you can keep them from striking.
Kill all birds.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
I read recently an article about how they actually use falcons at JFK to prevent bird strikes.
This seems to be about that, though I'm not sure if it was the article I saw: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/02/01/2009-02-01_untitled__falcon01m.html
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I'm no aviation expert... but it seems to me that at those speeds that bird would just get sliced into many chicken-wire-hole sized pieces and still go through the engine. On the plus side "chicken" nuggets would be fresh for the next flight! Watch out for the beak!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Then you get birds stuck in the titanium chicken wire, and the engine has a good shot of now sucking in both the bird and the chicken wire. On top of that, even if that doesn't happen, you're still seriously impeding air flow into the engine which is needed to make the engine function.
And according to Wikipedia at least, a typical modern jet engine shunts dead bird parts through a bypass rather than through the engine.
I am officially gone from
This idea was invented by Shampoo...
Proverbs 21:19
The issue with a screen over the front of the engine is drag.
It's been looked into extensively already, any screen fine enough to prevent smaller birds from getting sucked into the engine has a massive effect on the engine's performance.
Here at McChord, we've found the most effective methods involve a combination of ground cover control (eliminate food that the birds eat) and a 24 / 7 team of falcon handlers. But then, we don't have as much traffic as Sea-Tac...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Most birds use parallax to get their 3D cues. Think about it, for something that lives in full 3D space, most birds do not have stereoscopic vision. Their eyes are wide apart facing opposite directions with very little overlap. If the plane approaches the birds in such a way that the bearing (direction, angle) of the plane as seen by the bird is constant, the bird thinks the plane is part of the background, it is at infinity! That is why they don't take evasive action. If we put a series of LED lights along the length of the plane and turn them off and on to produce streaks of lights running from nose to tail, it will interrupt their visual cues and make the plane stand out from the background. That will give cues to the birds about the real position of the airplane. They will avoid us, we don't have to avoid them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.
A couple issues with putting a cone over the inlet of a subsonic engine.
1) If you restrict airflow to only entering from the sides, you're going to have massive separation bubbles as that flow has to turn 90 degrees to enter an axial engine. That results in a loss of efficiency and significantly reduces engine performance.
2) The added weight of this would kill the proposal for any aircraft manufacturer out there.
And not to be pedantic, but the inlet and thrust has a lot to do with whether something flies or not. If you can't get sufficient airflow over the wings to begin with your aircraft isn't going to achieve takeoff.
Oh wait nevermind, SeaTec!
Just surround the airport with wind power sites and the problem is solved...
And caused much anxiety
In the Audobon Society
With my games...
They call it impiety
And lack of propriety
And boy.. a variety
Of unpleasant names
But it's not against any religion...
To want to dispose of... a pigeon...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you were an engineer you'd realize it wasn't that easy...
they wouldn't go on strike...
Great effort on the part of SeaTac to keep birds off the runway. But it wouldn't have made a damned bit of difference to Flight 1549. From what I've seen online (not quite the official FAA report, but probably close enough), the bird strikes occurred several miles from the runway at around 3000 ft altitude.
In the case of SeaTac, approach and departure altitudes like these are seen as far away from the airport as 20 miles. On a few occasions, I've been watching little Piper Cubs/Cessnas/whatever buzzing around over my house at 3 to 5000 ft altitudes and seen a 747 fly in on approach to SeaTac underneath them. And I'm more than 20 miles from the airport. Its not likely that the FAA can keep the air clear of Canadian geese, bald eagles and other such birds over an area of more than 1200 square miles.
The only solution to preventing another 1549 incident is to keep commercial aircraft at higher altitudes for as long as possible.
Have gnu, will travel.
Interesting timing on this article for me since I actually have to fly to Seattle\Tacoma airport next week...
You mean "have to fly most of the wayto Seattle\Tacoma airport next week."
Wear warm clothes.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
We know birds hate Snakes.
Lets put Snakes on the planes. That way birds will avoid the plains to avoid the snakes.
I got that idea from a movie, I forgot what it was called.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It was a plane strike. Birds have feelings too, you insensitive clods!
Yep, you sure did kill that. Apparently leaving out half of the text doesn't help.
Sturgeon was an optimist.
Don't feed him. He's been posting this for a long time. ;)
What's the audio reception spectrum of birds? Can we add some sound that we do not hear and they hear?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Maybe if we just posted Cheney at the end of the runway with a shotgun...
Not quite. What they're talking about there is the difference between a turbojet and a turbofan.
People seem to assume that "the engine" is the entire thing you see hanging off the wing. Really, the engine is a fraction of the diameter of what you're seeing - a lot of the rest is plumbing and bypass ducts. The big fan you see on the front does the same job as a propeller, forcing large quantities of air back at relatively low speeds. On a large turbofan engine, the majority of that air will bypass the actual engine and get shunted out the back end. So depending on which part of the fan is hit, you could end up with bird parts going out with the bypass air instead of getting sucked into the engine. That way you just get damage to the fan, which is much safer and a relatively cheap fix. It's not really something that was designed to make bird-strikes less dangerous, though, it's just an inherent property of large turbofans. The bigger your bypass ratio, the more likely it is that the bird bypasses the engine.
The engines aren't harmed, they are clogged! A basic part of testing new engines is firing chickens into them with an air cannon, the blades survive just fine but the engine might not operate. The idea of the testing is that the blades coming loose or shattering and taking out fuel lines and such is very bad, all commercial airplanes must be able to function with one engine down and multiple strikes are fortunately uncommon.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The problem there is that most modern jet craft move faster than your average office building.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
The bird strikes did not occur near the airport. They occurred 2 minutes after takeoff at an altitude of 3,000+ feet. The aircraft was miles from the airport when it lost power.
The techniques they use are valuable because they reduce the bird density right around the airfield, and having a multi-engine failure like what happened with 1549 had would be MUCH less survivable if it occurred immediately after takeoff.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
If we FINALLY move to IPv6, there won't be nearly as many people using: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers , and thus, less birds hitting planes.
The problem there is that most modern jet craft move faster than your average office building.
Oh sure, on average.
The enemies of Democracy are
With a special attachment, the engine also makes julienne fries!
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
You're a bit off here. It is NOT a requirement that an engine survive a bird ingestion, only that it shut down safely, i.e. without any of the fans coming apart. And engines do tend to take some significant damage when they ingest birds.
To make things worse, the tests are done assuming a 4 lb. bird, but Canada Geese like the ones involved in the recent incident average 7-14 lbs.
And the tests aren't actually done with chickens anymore. They use a block of gelatin now; much easier to clean up.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
If birds are so tough, how come we don't just make the whole plane out of birds?
No problem. Just be prepared to pay five times as much for your tickets.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Bird bones are not the concern; they're hollow, lightweight, and brittle. It's the weighty mass of muscle that causes the damage.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
Hang on if I'm understanding what everyone is saying. We're going to take hundreds of tons of metal, people, and highly flammable liquid, hurl them into the air at high speeds, not just once but thousands of times per day all over the country, and not expect shit to happen?
Don't get me wrong, I understand we want to do everything in our power to make flight as safe as possible. But this is the first known incident of a dual flameout due to bird strikes in the history of commercial flight, right? I'd say in the 70-odd years we've been doing this, that's low enough to be acceptable risk.
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.