February 1, 2009

Lost Nation Airport in Willoughby, Cuyahoga County Airport in Richmond Heights and Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport see their share of birds that could collide with a plane and cause it to crash.

If it’s not geese or gulls, it’s a myriad of small starlings often smashing into a plane but rarely making the pilot lose control and sending the aircraft to the ground.

But none of the local sites see as many birds as LaGuardia Airport in New York City, where the US Airways jetliner pilot made the “Miracle on the Hudson” safe landing in the river after colliding with geese.

Area airports’ safety zones are monitored by the Federal Aviation Administration and volunteer National Bird Strike Committee USA. The Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard, or BASH, monitors military airports such as the one in Dayton where pioneer flier Orville Wright’s plane was hit by birds in 1908.

Including a few encounters but no crashes at the area airports, 82,057 bird strikes were reported by the NBSC nationally between 1990 and 2007.

Such strikes doubled annually from 1,759 to 3,666, or one collision for every 10,000 flights. The crashes cause a yearly $600 million in airport damages.

Of bird strikes in 2007, the committee reported one each at the Lost Nation and Cuyahoga County airports.

The airports

“We don’t have many birds here, and never a bird strike making a plane crash,” says Bob Heaton, manager of the Willoughby-owned Lost Nation Airport. “In about 2004, I think, a plane was traveling and had a bird strike and landed here. It did some damage.

“But birds are leery about stopping here. We mow the grass, and that doesn’t give them much to eat. We can get a company to use a little pistol as a bird bomb or firecrackers to scare away a flock of geese so they won’t land. Some use whistles for the same thing.

“We do see some Canada geese and seagulls because we’re so close to Lake Erie. But we don’t kill birds or any animals, including deer. We also have coyotes out here, and they help scare away birds and deer. I actually like the coyotes.”

Cuyahoga County Airport Manager Kevin Delaney says he sees rare bird strikes, and they haven’t significantly damaged an aircraft or caused any accident injury.

“Last year, we had about 50,000 flights, takeoffs and landings, and we had only one real bird strike like the one in 2007, which I think was a great blue heron, which is right off the lake.

“But sometimes a pilot might not realize the plane was struck. Starlings, for example, are so small the pilot can read the disturbance gauge as ‘fluctuation’ and not even really know it was starlings.”

The airport uses a U.S. Department of Agriculture permit to chase away risky birds or to kill them through a “depredation” program.

“We have a policy typically to harass them at first. We might beep the horn on a truck or use a small gun-like streamer or whistler, a pyrotechnic, to chase them away,” Delaney said.

“If that doesn’t work, we typically kill one or two geese, often with a shotgun, whatever the USDA wants. Waterfowl of any kind look for shelter near water for food. So we also try to eliminate the food to mitigate their need to be here.”

Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport, which sits on the Lake Erie shoreline, handles about 85,000 annual flights as the major reliever for Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

In 1981 at Burke, gulls collided with the jet flown by the leader of the Air Force Thunderbirds the day after the annual air show ended and he was to fly home. The plane started crashing and he leaped out, but his parachute failed and he died.

In May 2002, the NBSC said, a flock of gulls hit a Beechjet 400 and made it land safely at Burke but with $600,000 in damage. Searchers found 14 gull carcasses in the two engines.

By 2006, Burke had a “long history” of up to a dozen annual bird strikes, the NBSC said.

In that year, NBSC volunteers chased away an estimated 29,537 birds, 70 percent of them gulls, from Burke.

Volunteers scared away most waterfowl by using 810 pyrotechnics and by waving “dead-gull effigies hung by legs from 6-foot poles.” Volunteers used 12-gauge shotguns, .22-caliber rifles and .22-caliber air rifles to kill 571 gulls.

The FAA especially watches gulls and nonmigratory geese on airports’ grounds.

‘Feathered bullets’

According to an FAA report, “Birds were involved in 97.5 percent of the reported strikes and terrestrial mammals (mainly deer) in 2.1 percent” of national collisions “with the plane’s nose, windshield, engine, wing, rotor and fuselage 60 percent of the time 100 feet above ground level.”

“Gulls were responsible for the greatest number of bird strikes,” causing a total estimated $103 million in damage in a 16-year period through 2006, the FAA said.

But geese are increasing at a “mean rate” of 7.3 percent a year and are in the top 10 Ohio danger list for taking down heavier planes, especially jets.

The Canada goose is also among waterfowl on the protective list of the International Migratory Bird Act.

If a 12-pound goose strikes an aircraft going 150 miles per hour at lift-off speed, the force would be that of a 1,000-pound weight dropped from a height of 10 feet, the FAA says.

Between 1990 and 2007, geese strikes rose nationally from 2,090 to 9,891. Strikes dropped to 5,622 by Aug. 31, 2008, a year in which Ohio saw 77 such collisions but no crash landings.

That included one geese/plane collision each at Lost Nation and Cuyahoga airports (which has grounds in Richmond Heights in Cuyahoga and Willoughby Hills in Lake County).

The report includes one gull each at Lost Nation and Cuyahoga.

But it was not only geese and gulls in bird strikes. In 2007, the FAA also counted bird strikes by starlings, sparrows and 1,277 “unknown birds,” 487 of them “small.”

The Bird Strike Committee calls starlings “feathered bullets,” which reached a late-summer population of 150 million-plus as the second-most abundant bird in North America.

In the 2008 Great Backyard Bird Count, Lake County’s Mentor ZIP code area accounted for checklists of 460 bird species, the highest in Ohio. Cincinnati was No. 2 with checklists of 282 species.

The top 10 such lists in Ohio included Cleveland as No. 4, Painesville No. 5, the Mayfield area No. 7 and Chardon No. 10.

For example, of 37,827 Canada goose sightings in Ohio, Mentor accounted for 2,940.

Bird strikes aren’t a big problem at small landing sites like Concord Airport, run by Concord Township Trustee Connie Luhta, who is a decades-long international show-winning pilot.

“We’re using our third black Labrador. Labs are bird dogs. So the birds are scared,” she said.

Luhta said she has a bigger scare than a bird crash.

“I flew out once from Fort Lauderdale in Florida to the Bahamas and back in the last leg of (a race), and it wasn’t all the birds that bothered me. The biggest fear of all is fear of the unknown, and for me the greatest fear was pilot error,” she said.

Meanwhile, Lake County commissioners are in discussions with Willoughby about maybe taking over Lost Nation from the city.

Cuyahoga County commissioners also have asked their Lake County counterparts to partner with them at the Richmond Heights airport.

Asked about the possible bird strike cost and damage issues at either, Lake County Commissioner Raymond E. Sines chuckled:

“Now we’ve got one more question about costs: How many flights and how many times are there bird strikes?”