Air Force Uses Falcons To Protect Falcons

coondoggie writes "Birds and high-performance jet aircraft don't mix. So at a base in Germany, the Air Force is fighting birds with birds — specifically trained falcons that patrol the base and help eliminate at least some of the feathered threat to the F-16 Fighting Falcons and other aircraft."

Comments

Not new

[jddimarco]

In the mid-1980s, I worked for a few months beside a guy whose hobby was falconry; he told me at the time that he had been employed by the Toronto Airport to use his falcon to help reduce the number of seagulls near the airport.

Re:And have been for decades

[idontgno]

how difficult would it be to design some kind of screen or grating to protect the intake vents of an engine

Here is pretty much the canonical list of outcomes:

• Bird hits screen, both bird and screen go into the engine. Similar to status quo, except now there are solid metal or composite bits among the turbine blades.
• Bird hits screen, splats. Engine stalls because of sudden disruption in intake airflow. For an F-16, this is a problem, 'cuz it's single-engine. (In the course of my military career, I've heard the Viper jokingly referred to as the Lawn Dart for that very reason.)
• Bird never hits screen, but engine performance is continuously degraded because of the screen's affect on airflow and intake pressure. Requires serious redesign in order to compensate for a deliberate design decision based on flight-of-safety considerations. Never mind that having less available power and (perhaps) elevated stall susceptibility is a combat-safety issue (i.e., your hazard level in combat is directly related to the performance superiority of your aircraft over your adversary).
• Bird never hits screen, miraculous design work restores full combat specification performance to your warplane, bird hits canopy and knocks out the pilot; unguided plane flies into terrain.

Not everything on that applies to all aircraft, but in general I don't think there's a screen material in the world that would stop birds from engine ingestion (including chunks of bird sucked through a screen) while allowing adequate airflow in a high-performance, high-bypass jet engine. And then that still leaves fuselage, canopy, wing, and empennage birdstrikes.

Re:And have been for decades

[gnieboer]

At the speeds of a jet fighter (and even at the speeds of a slow prop transport), an average goose will penetrate the leading edge of the wing, destroy the bleed air duct (also metal) underneath, tear up the wiring, and sometimes damage the next layer of structure.

Look at the first stage fan blades in an engine next time you're boarding an aircraft (they are ones in front you can see). Those are the biggest, toughest, blades in the engine. They basically are strong enough to pull the entire aircraft forward. When a big fat bird hits one, they bend and break.

Now, the newest/biggest commercial engines have a remarkable ability to absorb birds without a problem, but the more 'finicky' engines on fighter jets are much more susceptable, and of course if you've only got one engine... that's a big deal.

So my point in describing the impact power that a bird has is to illustrate that for a 'screen' to be strong enough to stop a bird would also completely block any airflow, and those engines are HUGE vacuum cleaners, and if that airflow slows too much, something called a 'compressor stall' happens, and that's generally bad and scares the crap out of the passengers (flames shoot out of the back end of the engine, etc)