The number of collisions between birds and aircraft has rapidly increased over the last two decades, despite better technology to combat them.

The US Airways plane that improbably wound up floating in the Hudson

River has drawn attention to bird strikes, but a U.S. Department of Agriculture and Federal Aviation Administration joint report (pdf), released in June of 2008, warned that the danger birds pose to both commercial and military airplanes was on the rise.

According to the report, from 1990 to 2007 there were 82,057 bird strikes. The trends in the collisions are disturbing as well: In 1990, the industry saw 1,738 bird strikes; in 2007, the number had increased to 7,666. Some of that trend is due to increased air travel, but the number of wildlife strikes has tripled from 0.527 to 1.751 per 10,000 flights.

Those numbers were brought into terrifyingly sharp relief when the US Airways jet appeared to have hit a flock of birds, causing malfunctions which necessitated a splash landing.

"We’ve all known that it was just a matter of time. You can quantify it," said Barthell Joseph, a co-founder of Joseph Reed, which sells bird-deterrence technologies. "You can take the number of bird strikes and you can take the trend of bird strikes and you can take the number of commercial flights and it’s fairly simple to do the math."

Growing populations of birds and humans in the same areas have put the species on a collision course in the air that’s almost always deadly for the birds and severely hazardous, if not fatal, to humans, too. Human developments and bird-restoration programs have created new ecological niches that some bird species have jumped in to fill.

In particular, the Canada goose population is proving particularly problematic. Their numbers have ballooned to more than 3.5 million, and the birds don’t migrate, they stick around our cities. Many of the geese along the eastern seaboard are closer to feral than wild. After their forebears were nearly hunted to extinction, many domesticated birds were released into the wild (pdf), creating a specific population of geese uniquely suited to the "current landscaping techniques" of our urban and suburban landscapes. In the map at the right, you can see that most of the country is seeing large annual increases goose populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Report (linked above) found that the population of Canada geese in the eastern United States increased at a rate of 14 percent a year from 1989 through 2004.

The rising bird numbers are overwhelming the efforts of airport operations managers to cope with the problem, despite increasingly sophisticated technology to scare the birds away. Joseph also said that the Federal Aviation Administration wasn’t taking the bird strike problem seriously.





A small group of individuals at airports and other organizations, like the U.S. Navy, are studying the situation on their own through the Bird Strike Committee, a group dedicated to "understanding and reducing bird and other wildlife hazards to aircraft."

"Strikes are happening daily but you’re not seeing major damaging strikes, which are causing loss of human life or loss of the airplane,"

said John Ostrom, chair of the Bird Strike Committee and manager of Air Side Operations at the Minneapolis/St. Paul

Airport. "It’s out there, every single day."

The danger of the strikes has led Ostrom to spend his roughly

$200,000 wildlife deterrence budget on a system of remote-controlled propane cannons made by Joseph Reed.

The system, called Scare Wars, is composed of remote-controlled propane cannons that line runways at 1,000 foot intervals. The cannons, which produce 130 decibels of sound at 10 meters, can be fired from the control room with the aid of closed-circuit television cameras. As the propane cannons fire, the solar-panel powered units also emit distress calls from a variety of bird species. An older introductory video to the Scare Wars system can be seen in the video above.

Ostrom also said that new types of radar, like QinetiQ’s "Automatic Runway Debris Detection" system were being explored to combat bird strikes.

"Right now, the thing that’s being looked at the most is the use of RADAR at airports to try to assess the situational awareness with regard to what do you have out there in your airspace," Ostrom said, but he noted that for now, wildlife management is still a "hands-on, boots-on-the-ground type operation."

Further bird behavioral changes are another wild card in the bird-strike management equation. Climate change is transforming the traditional migratory patterns and natural habitats of many birds, according to numerous scientific reports like the USDA’s "Atlas of Climate Change Effects in 150 Bird Species of the Eastern United States." (pdf)

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook.