As U.S. and Canadian officials continue working toward an integrated bird strike database, airlines and airports will soon have practical new alternatives for keeping birds and aircraft apart.
The database efforts principally take the form of the “North American Bird Strike Advisory System” (NABSAS), a joint effort by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Transport Canada (TC), those countries’ defense agencies, as well as the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Academy in Colorado (where primary research is being conducted through the Institute for Information Technology Applications). First conceived a couple of years ago, a continent-wide data and advisory system also is still a few years away from becoming fully operational, says aviation bird strike consultant Russ DeFusco, who authored the paper proposing the new system.
The new alternatives in bird strike prevention include the installation of directional sonic devices to frighten birds away from flightpaths, and making sure that airfield vegetation is as unpalatable as possible.
Although the hazards of bird strikes have been known to the aviation community for a long time, it’s still a growing problem, says Richard Dolbeer, chairman of the Bird Strike Committee-USA (BSC-USA). After a low point was reached In North American bird populations around 1972, conservation efforts led to dramatic recoveries in numbers for many species. At the same time, aircraft kept getting quieter, and attaining higher speeds during takeoffs and landings, making it harder for birds to avoid them.
Bird strikes in the civil aviation industry that are reported to FAA average about 6,000 incidents per year, the agency says. Then again, that figure is probably only about 20 percent of the actual incident total. Thus, considering all the reported and unreported strikes, total costs probably exceed $489.8 million annually.
BSC-USA/Canada’s annual bird strike meeting, which this year is Aug. 21-24 in St. Louis, Mo., is becoming increasingly popular. The 2005 meeting in Baltimore drew a record 434 attendees, BSC-USA says.
Also, Air Safety Week readers only have to review our “Accidents and Incidents” feature for a sense of how often bird strikes occur or a bird is “ingested” (sucked into an engine).
Although most bird strikes do not cause major damages or injuries, there remains a possible “worst case scenario” of several large birds ingested into more than one engine of the came craft, Dolbeer explains. Two years ago, a plane that had just left Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (ORD) came upon a flock of cormorants, which are not only fairly large but fairly “dense” birds, he explains. Three cormorants hit the plane, with one getting sucked into an engine and causing an uncontained engine failure. The craft came back around and made an emergency landing at O’Hare. If the birds by chance had been ingested into more than one engine, the outcome could have been a lot grimmer, Dolbeer concludes.
Meanwhile, in preparatory work to establish the North American database, tests are under way at several airports — including Dallas/Fort Worth Int’l (DFW), Vancouver Int’l (YVR), John F. Kennedy Int’l (NYC), and Toronto Pearson Int’l (YYZ) — using the latest applications of small-scale radar to develop bird warning systems.
On an individual airport level, such systems are already working quite well, DeFusco tells Air Safety Week. But before such data can be fed into one centralized system, “threat levels” have to be calibrated so they mean the same thing at all airports. It wouldn’t do, for example, if sparrows triggered a certain threat level at one airport, while the same threat level is triggered by Canadian geese at another airport.
The database also will have a central location that analyzes data and issues advisories. Although there is still some contention as to where the center might be, the current consensus is leaning toward Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, DeFusco adds.
Meanwhile, at the end of May, TC made a major revision to its airport wildlife management policy, requiring all Canadian airports to keep comprehensive records of wildlife strikes, including birds; and whether the reports come from pilots, ground personnel, or aircraft maintenance workers.
This type of data collection remains voluntary in the United States, an FAA spokeswoman tells Air Safety Week. Also, while it’s up to U.S. airlines to collect this data; the Canadian regulations are aimed at airport operators.
Members of the U.S. aviation community have been pushing FAA to make such data collection mandatory, DeFusco adds.
Under the new Canadian policy, there also must be reports of dead wildlife that are found within 200 feet of a runway, if striking an aircraft is the likely cause of death. Airport operators must submit individual written reports within 30 days of each occurrence, or document all such occurrences in one report that comes out before March 1 of the following calendar year.
In Canada, there’s been data collection of a kind for the last decade or so, but it needs to be standardized so there can be trend analyses of birds’ behavior, and it needs to be harmonized with U.S. and International Civil Aviation Organization data, a TC spokeswoman tells Air Safety Week.
By and large, airports already do a lot of work to understand their immediate natural environment and mitigate the chances of birds, or even deer, colliding with a plane or another airport vehicle, says Brett Patterson, Vancouver’s director of operations safety and planning. So at one level, the revised Canadian regulations simply formalize what’s already being done, he tells Air Safety Week.
In the meantime, preventing bird strikes still principally remain a matter of wildlife management, or ensuring that the airport property both within and beyond the perimeter fence is as unattractive as possible to birds looking for food and nesting grounds. While there’s now years of accumulated experience in frightening birds with rifle blasts, border collies or pyrotechnics, and draining water from fields and ditches, it’s still a tough and never-ending job.
Generally speaking, the aviation community has tended to jump all over the latest interesting-sounding idea, BSC-USA’s Dolbeer says. But many new strategies get more credit than they deserve. The real key, Dolbeer, DeFusco, and Patterson all agree, is to constantly apply a mix of strategies. At large airports, that includes a commitment from the operators to continue funding the activities of full-time wildlife management personnel.
Then too, birds are smart. Just as they have become nonchalant in the face of 140 decibel jets in their immediate neighborhood, they also regularly adapt to routine wildlife- control strategies. Vancouver’s crows and herons apparently came to distinguish the vehicles driven by the airports’ wildlife management staff apart from other airport vehicles, by the formers’ bright yellow color and possibly the large numbers on their sides. So Patterson is experimenting with different colored vehicle paint jobs and rotating various airport vehicles into wildlife-patrol duty.
One of the most promising tools in detecting and thus, avoiding bird strikes, involves radar. Such systems can spot individual birds and separate them from other objects in the sky, Dolbeer says. But the “big question,” he quickly adds, is how practical the technology will be in providing useful, real-time information to pilots and controllers.
The U.S. manufacturer everyone points to is DeTect, Inc., based in Panama City, Fla. The firm now has bird-warning systems — which can take the form of small stand- alone units or as software added on to existing radar systems — at 16 U.S. airports, including DFW and Seattle-Tacoma Int’l (SEA), says DeTect’s Gary Andrews. But so far, the U.S. military and particularly USAF have shown a much stronger interest in these systems than has the civil aviation side. Interest also is much stronger in Canada and Europe, while U.S. commercial airports are “just beginning to wake up,” Andrews tells Air Safety Week.
The firm’s stand-alone units, dubbed “MERLIN,” are more appropriate for close-in readings. They can be constructed as permanent installations or left on trailers, and are placed in the middle of airfields.
At DFW, readings appear on screens in the vehicles of wildlife management personnel, Andrews says. While patrolling the grounds, they can make last-minute adjustments their wildlife management strategies.
In late May, the radar system at DFW displayed a bird hitting a commercial aircraft, DeFusco says. That marks the first time officials were able to watch a bird strike as it was happening.
Beside radar-based detection technology, there also are several promising new techniques in wildlife habitat management. One, to be featured at BSC-USA’s August meeting in St. Louis, would replace the grasses that birds and deer find so tasty with another, less palatable variety, Dolbeer says. Fescue grasses contain a fungus that has a symbiotic relationship with the grass, but which also produces a chemical that most wildlife finds distasteful in small quantities, and quite harmful in larger doses.
DeFusco’s nomination for most promising new bird-control technology involves directional sonic devices. Instead of the usual method of amplifying birds’ own distress calls and other alarming sounds via loudspeakers, which loses considerable signal strength outside the immediate area, the new technology would “project high decibel signals in a very focused beam for great distances,” he says. The U.S. military has developed the technology for human crowd control.
More promising techniques arise when considering birds’ visual abilities. The main question, Dolbeer says, is, “Can we make today’s planes more visible from birds’ perspective?” There is testing under way using pulsating landing lights for general aviation craft, with anecdotal evidence so far that it significantly reduces bird-aircraft collisions.
Birds also are able to see in the ultraviolet range beyond the normal range of humans’ vision, he adds. So it might help to paint the leading edges of a plane with paint that either reflects or absorbs ultraviolet light to create visual contrast.
Overall, there’s little hope of bringing the bird strike rate down to zero, but just in bringing down the numbers. At any rate, Vancouver’s Patterson believes that the aviation community “has come a long way” from the days of installing plastic owls.
It’s still likely enough today that a pilot can inadvertently take off right into a flock of birds, while it would be unthinkable to do that into a thunderstorm. Fifty years ago, weather mapping was at the same level that bird avoidance is at today, DeFusco says. Birds may be even less predictable than the weather, but technology — both high and low — may change that.
The revised TC wildlife policy is at http://canadagazette.gc.ca/partII/2006/20060517/html/sor85-e.html; more information from FAA is at http://wildlife-mitigation.tc.faa.gov/public_html/index.html.
>>Contacts: Russ DeFusco, (719) 264-8420,[email protected]; Brett Patterson, Vancouver, (604) 276-6141, [email protected]; Richard Dolbeer, BSC-USA, (419) 625-0242, [email protected]; Gary Andrews, DeTect, (850) 763-7200<<