For Airplane Safety, Trying To Keep Birds From Planes

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Every year pilots in the US report more than 5,000 bird strikes, which cause at least $400 million in damage to commercial and military aircraft. Now safety hearings are beginning on the crash of US Airways Flight 1549, where a flock of eight-pound geese apparently brought down a plane, plunging it and 155 people into the frigid waters of the Hudson River. Despite having experimented with everything from electromagnetics to ultrasonic devices to scarecrows, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to endorse a single solution that will keep birds out of the path of an oncoming aircraft." (More below.) "The best bet right now is understanding bird behavior, although an intriguing old pilots' tale — that radar can scatter birds — may carry enough truth to ultimately offer a viable technical solution to a deadly problem. 'We need to find out, is that an urban legend or is there some truth to that?' says Robert L. Sumwalt, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. The Federal Aviation Administration already has an extensive program in place for 'wildlife hazard mitigation,' but it seems ill suited to the problem that faced the US Airways flight, which struck geese five miles from the runway — too far for the New York airports to take action — at an altitude of 2,900 feet — too high for radars being installed around the country to detect birds. 'There's no silver bullet,' says Richard Dolbeer, a wildlife biologist and expert on bird strikes. 'There's no magic chemical you can spray or sound you can project that is going to scare the birds away.'"

Comments

Re:Shoot them

[Wrath0fb0b]

Especially since, from what I hear, areas around many airports have been essentially turned into wetlands.

(1) Flight 1549 was 5 miles from the airport at the time of the bird strike, meaning that they have to patrol a huge area (especially hard in the NYC metro area) to get rid of all the nesting sites there.

(2) The Canada (blame Canada!) geese that were ingested into the engine were just passing through the area on their migration route. So any sort of habitat destruction on the ground would have zero effect on them anyway. Good luck changing their migration routes too.

So, at least in this instance, there was basically nothing you could do about it except have trained pilots well-versed in emergency procedures. In fact, as a general matter, I think it's silly to invest in technology/training/whatever that solves an individual problem when you can invest in other measures that will accrue benefits across a wide variety of (perhaps unexpected) problems.

Inevitable, make sturdier planes...

[2obvious4u]

The planes velocity is too fast to move birds out of the flight path of planes. What needs to happen is make the planes capable of hitting a Canadian goose at 400 mph...

Re:Airbus

[ryturner]

That is a very well written post. Unfortinately that is not what happened. But good job bashing Airbus.

Re:why not kill two birds with one stone

[derGoldstein]

It's enough to stretch wire from high poles to deter birds from flying under them, and this is often used around construction sites.

However the problem here is height, and the fact the aircraft might "mind" objects being in their flight path...

From what I can recall from a documentary I saw on this topic, different breeds of cats (wild cats) are allowed around some airports to hunt birds. I can't find any link relating to this though...

I did, however, manage to find at least one mention of "mock hunters", like this one, which are flown around an airport to make real birds think that the place is full of predatory birds.

Re:Shoot them

[icebike]

So, at least in this instance, there was basically nothing you could do about it except have trained pilots well-versed in emergency procedures.

I think the story is focused on changing the idea that there is basically nothing you can do.

The search for deterrent measures should not be limited to ground based systems.

We should not have to forever live with engine technology that can't handle that which occurs naturally in its normal operating environment.

We should not have to de-bird large areas just to handle air traffic.

The focus is to manage the problem so that it does not require every pilot execute emergency procedures on a daily basis.

Re:It's simple

[icebike]

How about cow catchers?

I know that was supposed to be funny, but why not have a deflector that can be deployed in front of the engine For an instant, In an instant, and then retract.

Sure it blanks the engine, but it only needs to be there for a couple seconds.

This might be easier to do on tail-mounted engines, like 727's because the deflector (shaped like an air-brake) could deploy from the side of the aircraft.

But a pole protruding forward from the axis of engine could deploy near instantaneous deflectors
which retract just as quickly to bounce birds around the intake.

Life and Risk

[yoshi_mon]

What strikes me most about a subject like this is what I see as a mass denial by many: life is inherently risky.

At some point there may be a method to keep birds away from aircraft. Or aircraft might operate such a different way that birds are not a threat to them. But that is not the point. Rather so many people seem to think that life should be totally risk free.