Humans Responsible for Bird Strikes!!

Speaking of air, lets think for a moment about human’s impact on birds in the sky and vice versa. According to bird watchers, aviation experts, and other it seems that bird impacts with planes has been increasing. Unfortunately, this phenomenon has not come to the public’s attention until recently with US Airways flight 1549 that got crashed into the Hudson thanks to flying geese.

Plane crashes with birds have been documented since the beginning of aviation, and the first fatal accident occurred as early as 1912. However, with more and more passengers wanting to fly (talk about Jevons Paradox gone wild), business and tourism travel skyrocketing even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks there are ever more planes flying in the sky. According to the FAA since 2000 there have been over 486 cases involving planes hitting birds. 166 of those involved emergency landings, and 66 in aborted take-offs. In 1990 there was one strike per 10,000 flights, in 2007 there are three.

Of course, this whole thing is not the birds’ fault. Its humans. Aviation pundits say that it’s the conservation movements’ fault, since now that the birds have safe areas to breed in their numbers rise. But really the problem is much deeper than that. Human expansion patterns usually result in the destruction of forested land and the creation of suburban sprawl. Guess what happens? Well, the smaller birds like songbirds, meadowlarks, and bobtails that live in the forests generally stay away from planes and do not fly high. They stick to the forests. But when the forests are cut down and replaced with suburbia, new species replaces them- species like gulls, geese, pigeons, and turkey vultures. These species adapt to suburbia, (vultures eat roadkill, pigeons eat garbage), and worse yet they have no problem settling next to airports to nest. The vast majority of plane-bird strikes occur with these so called “big birds”. No, they are not yellow.

At airports like New York’s JFK and laguardia, this problem is especially pronounced since the airports are next the ocean, at a nexus of “big bird” migratory flight paths. Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is only a few miles from JFK airport. Officials have come up with interesting ways to make sure the birds don’t meet the planes. They use falcons and dogs to practice “bird control”; they allow red-tailed hawks to nest near runways, since these hawks chase other birds away and run away from planes. But ultimately, there is no stopping the flocks of geese and vultures from staying around these airports. Perhaps if we kept the land around the area wooded in its natural state, we wouldn’t have to deal with flocks of kamikaze meat. Unfortunately, on Long Island at least the suburbanization is so profound that it is highly unlikely any major changes can be made. But this should be a lesson for other airports and the aviation industry in general: don’t have suburban sprawl next to your airports- rather, keep the place wooded. Not only it may help a bit with recycling carbon (considering major airports, probably not much), but the forests will also prevent major catastrophes from occurring because of the existence of bird flocks.


References:

Bird Strikes. New York Times Authors Blog.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/dont-blame-mother-nature-for-the-crash/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/nyregion/16strike.html?_r=1