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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."
Always fly over rivers wide enough to land on!
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.
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
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
Dogs would be useful but it'd be a lot more fun if we could get a pterodactyl out there hunting the birds.
And then Mothra to hunt the pterodactyl to prevent THEM from getting sucked into engines, and then Godzilla to in turn keep mothras from taking down planes.
What about just building more wind powered generators. I've heard those are bad for migratory birds.
Clean energy and less birds.. guess you could say that's killing two birds with one stone?
*ducks* (or should I say geese?)
Ok, I'm leaving now.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
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?
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!
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.
Simpler than that; use Darwinian natural selection. Simply invent a machine the size and shape of a jet-aircraft which zooms around airports emitting loud jet turbine noises, and sucks in and shreds any bird not conditioned to keep well away from such stimuli. Rinse and repeat.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
They already do. The problem is traffic management.
Airlines would love to save gas by going right up to the point where they can cut the engines to idle and then coast in to the airport. But since everyone wants to do that it would create a traffic nightmare. They need a way to line everyone up on the same runway so they can space them out properly. And if it's cloudy, you need a way to make sure you can be lined up on your runway when you come out of the clouds. So they make instrument approaches that use navigation aids on the ground or GPS.
This works well at small airports, but busy ones have too many planes coming in so they make these things called a Standard Terminal Arrival Route (STAR). Everyone flies to one of these routes and then they join up to an instrument approach to land.
Airlines would love nothing more than to save gas by doing exactly what you suggest, and people on the ground would also like to not have airplanes buzzing their house at all hours of the day, but it's not even close to practicable.
If birds are so tough, how come we don't just make the whole plane out of birds?