As much as cheap travel options such as cheap airplane tickets, cheap vacation packages, discount travel packages, and discount hotel rooms serve as inducements for people to fly, traveling safely remains everyones number one priority.
Bird strikes are a threat to airline passenger safety. The number of reported collisions between plane and wildlife is increasing the U.S. even as airports and the federal government continue to work to reduce the potentially deadly risk they pose.
Last year there were over 11,500 reported collisions, almost double that in 2002, and quadruple a decade earlier. Damages and lost flight time from collisions over the last 20 years is estimated to cost $600 million yearly.
The significant increase in the number of collisions between planes and animals may be due in part to better reporting. Other significant facts included more people flying, flocks of birds growing, and planes becoming quieter with turbofan engines.
Ever more inventive steps are being taken at airports across the nations: explosives, traps, deployment of other animals including falcons and pigs. To date, no strategy being employed eliminates the risk.
Experts believe that the challenge is a management issue rather than a problem that can be solved. Airports and airlines need to be vigilant, continuously monitoring, and continuously adapting their mitigation techniques. No one step, or combination of steps, is expected to ever to eliminate this problem.
Birds represent the biggest threat in that they can smash a pilots windshield and be sucked into engines. Canada geese jammed the engines on the January 2009 US Airways Miracle on the Hudson flight that landed without serious injuries on the Hudson River just off Manhattan.
A crash in March 2008 killed five people after their Cessna 500 collided with several American white pelicans.
Federal officials work closely with airport executives as a result of such incidents developing plans for discouraging animals from settling on airfields, chasing them away when they arrive, and sometimes even killing them.
Airport officials work from the ground up to discourage animals from foraging on their airfields. Some airports are experimenting with planting grasses that Canada geese do not like to eat. Removing ponds and fruit or seed bearing trees help discourage birds.
Salt Lake City International Airport has started recycling asphalt during repaving projects using the gravel to cover grassy areas between runways. Over 1 million square feet of grass has been covered with gravel over the past three years. Rodents, midges, grasshoppers and army worms all like a grassy environment and attract birds.
A common way of scaring birds away is with noise. Fireworks blasted hundreds of feet away from a shotgun as well as noise from starter pistols and bottle rockets fired from pistols have proven effective. The problem is that someone has to go out near the birds and fire off the noises, making the process labor intensive and costly. Also birds sometimes get used to automatic noise makers.
Airports from Baltimore to Seattle are trapping and relocating raptors to new hunting grounds.
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