CORPUS CHRISTI — A malfunction in the design of the throttle and a bird strike caused two training aircraft from Naval Air Station Kingsville to crash in separate incidents in 2005. The causes of those incidents were released to the Caller-Times last week.

The T-45A Goshawk that crashed on May 11, 2005, on land owned by the base was the result of an engine shutdown related to the throttle design, according to a naval investigation report released on July 16. The design might prevent the idle stop from engaging after the landing gear handle is placed in the down position.

A pilot was injured in that incident. Navy investigators recommended redesigning the throttle. Attempts on Tuesday to reach the Chief of Naval Air Training were not successful.

The $20 million aircraft was considered a loss and the Navy did not replace it because it had a program to periodically replace the Goshawks due to wear and tear.

The Navy also didn’t replace the $20 million aircraft heavily damaged after a crash five months later.

A second T-45A Goshawk crashed on Oct. 31, 2005, while conducting touch-and-go’s, flight procedures necessary to land and take off from aircraft carriers.

The crash occurred on King Ranch property and was found to be a bird strike.

An investigation report stated the pilots saw the bird go into the intake before the aircraft began to malfunction. An examination of the aircraft after the incident showed severe damage to the compressor blades caused by the intake of birds.

The pilots in both incidents, when medically cleared, were to resume their flight status, according to the reports. The aircraft and pilots were assigned to Training Wing Two at the Kingsville base.

May 11, 2009

Free as a bird: The pelican was enjoying a leisurely flight past a pylon in the Red Bull Race. Sadly, Austrian pilot Hannes Arch wanted the same airspace was closing in fast...

Sticky end: The poor pelican was butchered by the plane after they collided during the Red Bull air race in San Diego

As pilot Hannes Arch moved into second position in an exciting air race, he had no choice but to try a risky overtake of his nearest competitor.

Sadly the pelican came off a distinct second best, with his leisurely flight brought to an abrupt end by the sound of roaring propellers and a quick finish.

The grisly moment was captured during the last round of the Red Bull air race in San Diego yesterday.

The pilot and the pelican both wanted to occupy the same air space, rounding the top of one of the pylons marking out the above-ground track.

The poor creature was quickly torn to pieces by the collision, and Pilot Arch was also left feeling only slightly less shattered by the incident, which in many instances can bring down an aircraft.

The pilot didn’t alter his course and continued to the finish line – although he lost his gold medal and came in third, blaming the loss on the bird strike.

His plane was left with with a blood-covered hole on the right side of his plane’s tail.

Pilot Arch said: ‘It was bad luck, but good luck that I was able to fly to the finish line.

‘I was having a really good run and then I had a bird strike that distracted me.

‘I was off line after that. The bird strike nearly tore off my horizontal stabiliser. It was bad luck but good luck that I was able to fly to the finish line.’

This is not the first time this year a mid-air collision between bird and plane has led to dramatic images.

Only four months ago pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger landed an Airbus A320 on New York’s Hudson River following a collision with a flock of birds.

Geese soar through the sky as a jet takes off from North Carolina’s Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in January.

	INCIDENTS OF BIRD STRIKES AT BUSIEST AIRPORTS Reports by airports of collisions between aircraft and wildlife such as birds vary dramatically. Strikes* from 2000 through mid-2008 at the USA’s 25 busiest airports: Airport Total Atlanta 75 Chicago O’Hare 319 Dallas-Fort Worth 643 Los Angeles 233 Phoenix 480 Denver 597 Las Vegas 8 Houston 35 Detroit 278 Minneapolis-St. Paul 153 Charlotte 22 Philadelphia 31 Washington Dulles 163 Newark 203 Cincinnati 229 Logan (Boston) 241 Miami 83 Salt Lake City 372 New York LaGuardia 261 Memphis 86 San Francisco 77 Seattle-Tacoma 205 New York Kennedy 846 Oakland 111 St. Louis 18 * – Totals include cases reported to federal regulators by airport staff and incidents in which dead birds were found near runways. They do not include reports from pilots, airlines or air-traffic controllers. Sources: Federal Aviation Administration and USA TODAY research

The inconsistent reporting undercuts the ability of federal regulators, airports and airlines to assess the risks that birds create, according to some aviation and wildlife experts. Reports to aviation regulators about bird strikes are not mandatory. At New York’s John F. Kennedy International, located next to a wetlands and wildlife preserve, airport workers make numerous reports each year of bird strikes on the airport grounds, according to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data. The reports averaged nearly 100 per year from 2000 through mid-2008. But at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International, the world’s busiest airfield, workers reported an average of 10 per year for the same period. In 2003 and 2005, the airport did not report any strikes. “How is it that a busy airport like JFK can have all these bird strikes, but another busy airport like Atlanta can’t have any?” says Paul Eschenfelder, an airline pilot who teaches airport wildlife control. “I think there’s a reporting problem there.” Hartsfield spokesman John Kennedy says he could not explain why the number of reports was so low. The airport is “very aggressive” about its wildlife control program and reports every incident it learns about, he says. The FAA had initially sought to prevent public access to its bird database, arguing that airports, airlines and pilots might be less likely to report incidents if those reports became public. The agency reversed itself and released the data Friday. Interest in risks from birds has swelled since a US Airways jet struck a flock of geese near New York City and was forced to ditch in the Hudson River on Jan. 15. All 155 on board survived. Collisions between birds and aircraft serious enough to cause substantial damage have occurred at nearly all of the nation’s large commercial airports and have increased dramatically since 1990, according to the federal data released Friday. USA TODAY analyzed only those reports in the database that were made by airports. They include cases of bird carcasses being found next to runways or airport employees spotting a plane hitting a bird. They don’t include reports by airlines, pilots or air-traffic controllers. Most large airports had hundreds of such reports since 2000. Denver, Chicago O’Hare, Phoenix Sky Harbor and Dallas/Fort Worth each reported more than 300 bird strikes since 2000. Aggressive reporting is a critically important way to assess the threat from birds, says David Ishihara, director of aviation operations at Boston’s Logan. Logan had 241 bird strike reports since 2000. “We need to know when, where” birds hit planes, Ishihara says. By contrast, Palm Beach International staff haven’t reported a single bird incident at the airport since 2000, the data show. Spokeswoman Casandra Davis says reports to the FAA are voluntary and “finding a dead bird on your airport is not reportable.” Las Vegas McCarran, Tampa and Nashville all reported 10 or fewer bird strikes since 2000, according to the data. Because of concerns over lack of reporting, the National Transportation Safety Board in 1999 called on the FAA to make reporting mandatory. The recommendation by accident investigators was rejected by the FAA. Richard Dolbeer, a retired Agriculture Department biologist who developed the FAA’s bird strike database, says the data suggest that “some airports are doing a much better job of reporting than others.” Dolbeer says it’s in an airport’s interest to aggressively monitor all bird activity. “If you cannot define the problem, you cannot solve it.”

So far it had always been argued, that while bird strikes into a single engine are rather common, impact to two or more engines, let alone failure of two or more engines as a result of bird strikes, would be so extremely rare, that that possibility can be neglected.

The Aviation Herald points out several accidents (1988-2009) around the world (no claim of completeness), that were caused by bird strikes into multiple engines damaging more than one engine, causing power loss to more than one engine or bringing the airplane down:

FAA list of dual engine bird strikes between 1990 and 2008:

FAA

The FAA released information on the location of bird strikes for the first time Friday, after public pressure mounted following the dramatic splashdown of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River Jan. 15. A bird strike knocked out both the aircraft’s engines.

The Associated Press reports:

Topping the list of airports where planes were either substantially damaged or destroyed by birds since 2000 were John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York with at least 30 such accidents and Sacramento International Airport in California with at least 28 accidents. Kennedy, the nation’s 6th busiest airport, is located amid wetlands that attract birds, and Sacramento International, the nation’s 40th busiest, abuts farms whose crops draw birds.

(To explore the FAA data on your own, click here.)

Since Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger guided the Airbus A320 onto the Hudson River early this year after taking off from LaGuardia — not JFK — the public has become more acutely aware of the threats Canada Geese can pose to aircraft. (The aircraft sucked several of the fowl into its two engines, knocking both out of commission.)

But according to the data released Friday, white-tailed deer struck on runways have caused more incidents of serious damage to planes since 1990 — at least 288 accidents — than any individual species of bird. And even in the bird world, Canada Geese come second after gulls for serious damage in cases where a species identification could be made. Since 1990, 11 people have died in airplane collisions with birds or deer since 1990, the FAA data show.

June 9, 2009

Every day, tucked five floors above the eight-ton African elephant that greets visitors at Washington’s Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Carla Dove tackles some of the Air Force’s dirty work—literally—at her forensic ornithology laboratory. Behind a door marked FEATHER IDENTIFICATION LAB, Dr. Dove (yes, that’s her real name) sorts through shredded feathers, bits of claws or beaks, and sometimes nothing but bird goo called “snarge”—all in an effort to discover, CSI-style, what types of birds crash into military and commercial airplanes.

Dove’s work will be back in the public eye Tuesday as the National Transportation Safety Board holds a public hearing in Washington on US Airways Flight 1549, which made that unforgettable water landing in New York City in January. In the months since the “Miracle on the Hudson”, the Smithsonian lab has identified the birds that destroyed that flight’s engines as migratory Canada Geese, including at least one male and two females.

On a recent tour of her facility, Dove, an easy-going “40-something” woman with blond hair and the accent of her native Fulks Run, Va., showed NEWSWEEK forensic evidence from Flight 1549, including a smelly tub of bagged up snarge and feathers. Each day’s mail brings Dove and three assistants 10 to 18 envelopes full of bird remains like these, sent by the U.S. Air Force, Navy and commercial airports, which are compared against 620,000 bird specimens in the museum’s collection. Sleuthing out these birds’ IDs isn’t just for statistical purposes; it could potentially save lives, both human and bird. Though most reported bird strikes have no fatalities (except, of course, for our feathered friends), identifying the fallen creatures impacts how they are managed by airports and wildlife officials. And aircraft manufacturers have factored in the weight of the species involved in strikes when designing plane engines.

“In order to fix the problem we need to know what it is,” explains Eugene LeBoeuf, the U.S. Air Force chief of the Bird/Wildlife Aircraft Strike Hazard team. Most of Dove’s work comes from the Air Force since the agency requires that all bird strikes be reported. Since 1985 the Air Force has reported more than $250 million worth of damage from strikes involving one species alone, the American White Pelican. Though strikes involving pelicans are less frequent than incidents with smaller birds like Horned Larks and Mourning Doves, the pelicans are the most costly offenders because of the damage they can do with 15-pounds of girth. These pelicans have been responsible for 21 strikes to Air Force craft, two of them downing planes, says LeBoeuf. When damaging strikes like that happen, Dove’s lab swings into high gear—providing analysis as quickly as a few hours or a day.

While the Air Force’s bird strike database has been online for years (though difficult to find), the Federal Aviation Administration data only became publicly available in April, amidst objections that releasing the data might paint an unfair picture; reporting to the FAA is voluntary, and not all airports report all their strikes. In fact, the FAA estimates that only 20 percent of strikes are reported. Catherine Lang, the FAA acting associate administrator for airports says that despite the low figure, the FAA believes that the most damaging strikes do come to their attention.

In May, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York announced that he will propose legislation to make reporting of all commercial bird strikes mandatory. He noted that the $387 million the FAA has provided since 1997 for addressing wildlife management around airports is awarded based on current estimates of bird strikes. He argues that the problem may be larger than the public knows, and it’s not going away: recent studies suggest that many of the most hazardous species are increasing in population size and seem to be growing accustomed to noise generated by humans and their machines.

While Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood isn’t sure that legislation is needed, he tells NEWSWEEK, “I can’t think of why we would object to this.” LeBoeuf can: enforceability. How would the FAA ensure that all bird strikes were reported? he asks. Many strikes are only discovered by maintenance crews after the fact. (Schumer’s office did not respond to NEWSWEEK’s inquiries on this matter.) LeBoeuf says reporting is easier to enforce in the armed services since its members are accustomed to many rules and regulations, but even then he isn’t sure all strikes get reported.

Identifying which birds are most likely to hit aircraft does not necessarily translate into a silver bullet for avoiding them. While the Air Force can choose not to fly at a certain time or fly a different route, commercial air lines don’t have that luxury. Impatient passengers would not stand for their flights being cancelled on account of possible bird migration. Existing radar technology used by both the military and the FAA rely on Doppler weather radar to look at bird flight patterns on a bigger scale. Smaller local radar stationed at a few airports and Air Force bases, depending on the model, can detect birds about five to six miles out and about 3,000 feet up. This type of avian radar is only being used at a few sites though and is not used to instruct pilots in real-time, in part because the radar can interfere with the transmissions of other technology and has not been reviewed to the FAA’s satisfaction, says Ed Herricks of the Center of Excellence for Airport Technology at the University of Illinois. Even if the radar technology had been stationed at LaGuardia Airport (which it was not), it probably would not have detected the geese that downed Flight 1549 since the incident occurred at the radar’s limits, he says.

The complex obstacles to utilizing the technology are more than a matter of money. “The public expects Star Wars is real,” LeBoeuf comments. “There’s an awful lot to do between getting the information on the machines and transferring that information to the pilots.”

In the meantime, Dove says each envelope in the mail gets her a little closer to making air travel safer. Her process involves comparing feathers to the Smithsonian samples and using DNA analysis to identify tissue samples or snarge (a term created from combining “snot” and “garbage”). When those both fail, the team looks at the barbs on feathers to identify at least the family of bird (e.g. duck or dove). “It’s really quite complex,” she explains. “When you take a feather from a different part of a bird, the barbs on the downy part may be entirely different.” Dove estimates it took her some eight to 10 years to hone her techniques. Now the lab reports it can ID about 90 percent of the bird-strike remains it receives. (Watch a video of Dove in action at her lab.)

Once they know what birds they’re dealing with, wildlife biologists can then roll out their full arsenal—making the area around airports as inhospitable as possible by getting rid of the birds’ favored food source, and in the case of Canada Geese, employing remote-control boats or border collies to chase them out of ponds, oiling eggs which keeps them from hatching, and firing loud specialized firecrackers to scare them off, according to Allen Gosser, assistant state director for New York with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services. Gosser says that during migratory season his teams will come back to a site by an airport two or three times a day for five days, in the hopes of sending the “stay out” message to the birds. But their efforts can only go so far—pushing birds to another location, typically three miles away, and some of their efforts are blocked by environmental-protection laws.

Dove, the daughter of poultry farmers, used to run and hide when her grandmother butchered a chicken for dinner, but now she doesn’t even flinch when studying the most grisly remains. “It’s like solving a puzzle,” she says. “Each case is different with a different set of materials, and that keeps it interesting.” If the FAA makes reporting mandatory, she anticipates a lot more birds will be sent her way. “It’s not a glamorous job, but I love it. I can’t see myself doing anything else,” she says. And for that, air passengers everywhere should be grateful.

An Air Force jet at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage collided with more than 30 Canada geese on Sept. 22, 1995, causing the plane to crash shortly after takeoff and killing all 24 crew members.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) found that about 150 airports did not complete studies of wildlife hazards despite their histories of serious collisions between aircraft and birds or other animals, according to four government and industry officials. None would comment publicly before the FAA releases its findings.

The studies are the critical first step that airports use to identify bird risks and develop a plan to keep wildlife away from planes. A list of the airports wasn’t disclosed because each has to be notified by the FAA before it will be publicly identified as having failed to complete the hazard surveys.

The FAA has notified the Airports Council International-North America of its findings and said that it intends to contact airports within days, according Chris Oswald, the group’s vice president for safety and operations.

The situation shows that airports aren’t taking the risks seriously, said Paul Eschenfelder, lead instructor in the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s airport wildlife control program.

“It just shows how this problem has been ignored and shuffled to the side by the aviation community over the years,” Eschenfelder said. “It takes a catastrophe to focus everybody’s attention.”

Federal regulators have been studying whether large birds have created a growing hazard to planes.

A US Airways jet struck a flock of Canada geese on Jan. 15, knocking out both engines and forcing the plane to splash down in New York’s Hudson River.

The National Transportation Safety Board will begin a two-day hearing starting Tuesday into the accident. The pilots and flight attendants were hailed as heroes after the nearly powerless Airbus A320 touched down in the river and everyone escaped.

JETS DOWNED BY BIRDS

Jan. 2009: US Airways Flight 1549 hits large birds after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia, lands safely in the Hudson River Sept. 1995: U.S. Air Force plane crashes after hitting geese during takeoff from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, killing 24 Feb. 1973: Learjet crashes after hitting birds during takeoff from Atlanta’s DeKalb Peachtree Airport, killing eight Oct. 1960: Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crashes into Boston Harbor after hitting starlings during takeoff, 62 killed

Federal aviation law requires that airports conduct an assessment of hazards from birds or other wildlife if planes have major collisions with animals. The assessment, which must be approved by FAA inspectors, serves as a guide for how the airport should deal with the wildlife.

Airports use numerous techniques to remove birds. Air cannons or fireworks that make loud noises can be fired to scare birds away. Other solutions could be more subtle, such as keeping grass mowed around runways to make them less attractive to birds.

“Airports and FAA are now working at the national and local levels to enhance their wildlife management programs and ensure full airport compliance,” Oswald said.

The engine of US Airways Flight 1549 that crash landed into the water on Jan. 15 rests on a barge after it was retrieved from the icy Hudson River in New York by salvage crews. A run-in with birds sent the jet full of people into the Hudson River.

Assuming the US Airways Airbus A320 ditched in New York’s Hudson river two weeks ago proves to have been brought down by Canada geese, the incident will still be only the most serious of numerous birdstrikes in the past year.

But regardless of the astoundingly fortunate outcome, a renewed industry focus on tackling what has proved to be an enduring challenge for civil aviation seems certain.

It is a tribute to sound regulatory action and manufacturers’ engineering expertise that modern engines have proved to be so resilient when struck by birds. Despite that, the hazard generates huge costs even when aircraft survive, and there have been sufficient close calls to leave little doubt that a catastrophe is a reasonably likely turn of events.

Just two months earlier a Ryanair Boeing 737-800, also CFM56-powered, barely made it to a landing that collapsed the landing gear when both engines lost virtually all power after ingesting a number of starlings from a flock that engulfed it at about 200ft (60m) above ground on short finals to Rome Ciampino.

A month earlier a Cyprus Airways Airbus A330 flew from Larnaca, Cyprus to London despite having ingested birds into both engines on departure.

A recent report from the French government and civil aviation authority DGAC noted that 700 birdstrikes occur in the country each year, including 20% considered “significant” in terms of damage, cost or safety. It records a Boeing 767 incident in 2007 in which the ingestion of three herring gulls generated a €4 million ($5.17 million) repair bill.

Major UK airport operator BAA has adopted a strategy of concentrating its bird-control effort on those species that are most prevalent and/or most likely to cause the worst damage. It is pleased with the results, which have seen such incidents at its seven locations fall steadily from 108 in 2004 to 71 in 2007, but still totalled 44 by the end of August last year.

John Allan, head of the birdstrike avoidance team at the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Central Science Laboratory (CSL) and chairman of the International Birdstrike Committee (IBSC), says BAA’s flagship Heathrow operation is a global industry leader with fewer than 1 strike per 10,000 aircraft movements. “There are European airports with rates of more than 10 per 10,000 movements,” he says.

UK CAA figures reveal a total civil birdstrike number for the nine months up to September 2008 as being more than 1,200, although the advent of mandatory reporting in the UK in 2004 drove the number of recorded incidents up dramatically – many of them minor.

The US Federal Aviation Administration reported more than 33,000 civil birdstrikes between 1990 and 2000, and the figure now runs at 7-8,000 a year as reporting has been tightened up.

Airbus’s analysis of in-service reports suggests that two out of three birdstrikes result in a delay of upwards of 90min due to checks being carried out, plus repairs if required. The manufacturer says that incidents on take-off or climb-out result in a one-in-three likelihood that the flight will not continue to its planned destination. But it adds that approach incidents, probably due to low power settings, are more benign, and in one recorded case at a maritime airport an Airbus A320 flew through a flock of birds without ingesting any but leaving 250 dead birds on the tarmac.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Much of the best practice in bird control is now widely accepted and implemented with local variations according to native species and habitat. Relatively long grass – 15-20cm (5.9-7.8in) in the UK – is the norm, covering of storm ponds and other standing water with wire grids or floating balls for smaller areas is common, and planning regulation to restrict the development of waste disposal and gravel digging near airports is in global use to varying degrees.

Technological solutions are less common, but the past couple of years have seen a growing interest in the use of high-resolution radar to track birds. The systems entering service are typically enhanced versions of commercially available maritime radars, mechanically scanned and either X-band or S-band, but with sophisticated signal processing added.

Dr Tim Nohara, president of Niagara, Ontario-based Accipiter Radar Technologies (ARTI), says the systems are able to resolve targets down to individual birds. He explains that the benefit of radar is that it gives all-weather, day and night surveillance of local bird activity in a way that human observers cannot achieve.

Additionally it provides real time and recorded historic data for subsequent analysis including location, height, speed and heading.

This is crucial as a “force multiplier” when implementing classic “habitat modification” techniques he says. “Avian radars allow you to measure the efficiency of these methods. The fact of the matter is that now they use humans periodically to sample it, but at night time there is virtually no data and it is very sparse by day.”

Under a US FAA Center of Excellence for Airport Technology (CEAT) programme, ARTI has systems running at Seattle Tacoma International and Chicago O’Hare, plus another at Kennedy International, which is delivered but not yet operational.

“This is putting radars into candidate airports and really understanding what they give you and understanding their limitations. And that moves to the second part, which is to see how would controllers and wildlife experts and so on use this tool,” says Nohara.

He notes that the US Airways accident has sparked interest in the possibility of using the radar data in real time to provide live avoiding information to controllers. Intriguingly, he says recent ARTI work designed to capture data on near-misses as well as the much rarer birdstrikes demonstrated that real-time data could be captured.

He cautiously suggests: “This is the most futuristic use – but you can imagine an advisory from an avian radar that there are some movements in such an area that might get into conflict with aircraft. The technology is available and could provide that kind of indicator, but more work needs to be done to see how effective that might be.”

More realistically for now he sees the radars as being of enormous use to under-resourced airport wildlife staff. A biologist arriving for work could fast-forward through the night-time radar recording and watch where the birds have roosted.

And by collating historic data it will be much easier to identify local problem areas, such as standing water.

He foresees radar being used in Europe, where the use of safety management systems is more widespread, to give airport management an accurate measure of return on investment in bird-control programmes.

Detect, of Panama City, Florida, which supplies the “Merlin ATC” radar system, relates an incident in which a single bird that hit an aircraft caused a runway at Kennedy International to close for 6min on an otherwise free-flowing day, resulting in an immediate air traffic back-up.

“A radar-indicated hold of 30s for a bird to clear the runway may be more acceptable in terms of traffic management than a 6min delay when a strike has occurred, and tools such as Merlin ATC could provide much improved situational data to airport personnel to support sound decision-making,” it says.

In Europe, Amsterdam Schiphol airport will shortly begin using the Robin Lite radar system developed by the Netherlands’ TNO research and development organisation. Senior project manager Addy Borst says the system is already in use with the country’s air force and has cut the service’s birdstrike rate by a remarkable 50%, although the commercial priorities at civil airports may make similar gains difficult to achieve.

Robin Lite has the claimed capability to analyse wing-beat patterns of individual birds in a flock which, says Borst, gives an indication of size and hence species – potentially useful information.

He explains: “Some birds are not really an issue for birdstrike protection because they are smart enough to get away. Ravens, for example, learn quite fast. But gulls and pelicans are quite stupid birds. So birdstrike protection people would like to know what kind of birds to approach.”

He also believes that there is the potential for air traffic controllers to use data in realtime, but suggests that that in turn raises a legal issue. He says: “Controllers could be informed when you see a swarm of birds approach and can see that their trajectory will take them into conflict with aircraft, and then you could halt take-offs for say 30 seconds.

“But then if they decide to give take-off clearances instead then there is a liability issue.” It is not a theoretical issue – airports have already paid out large sums to airlines in liability settlements following birdstrikes.

NOT CHEAP

In the UK, CSL’s Allan points to resource constraints as a key factor. He says: “In essence we know what needs to be done. We have enough knowledge about bird management and bird-scaring techniques to keep it under control. But some of this work is not cheap. Managing an airfield to make it unattractive to birds is very expensive and if you are one of the smaller airports this is an issue.

“Heathrow has two [bird control] vehicles out all day and it is do-able. The difficulties arise when you have to find a budget to do this work.”

The result, he says, is that many airports tend to focus on bird-scaring, which is successful in the short term, but undertake inadequate habitat-management work, which would yield better long-term results.

He is also unhappy with the degree of research being performed in the UK, noting that, through lack of data, “we really don’t understand how to do bird control at night” despite probably having the technology to do it.

And he worries that the industry is failing to keep up with the evolving threat, notably by still using techniques aimed at controlling lapwings, formerly the prevalent species of concern in the UK, when pigeons, which require a different approach, are now by far the biggest threat.

OKLAHOMA CITY – Five people died when an airplane collided with a flock of pelicans, and the family of two of them says the Oklahoma City Airport Trust, the state Department of Airports and Oklahoma City are responsible, because they failed to comply with federal aviation regulations.

All five occupants, including pilot Timothy Alan Hartman and Rickie D. Sandoval, were killed in the crash just after takeoff from Wiley Post Airport, a reliever airport for Will Rogers World Airport, in March 2008, according to the lawsuit in Oklahoma County Court.

The Cessna Citation CE-500 jet collided with a flock of “very large” American white pelicans over Lake Overholser in Oklahoma City. The birds destroyed control surfaces on the aircraft’s horizontal stabilizer, causing the plane to “immediately invert into an uncontrollable, nose-down attitude and descend at a high rate into a wooded area” about 3 miles from the airport, where it crashed and caught fire, according to the complaint.

Hartman’s and Sandoval’s families say the defendants, as sponsors of Wiley Post Airport, a public-use airport that receives federal money, failed to comply with FAA regulations and failed to follow standards provided by the International Civil Aviation Organization and bird-strike experts.

Will Rogers World Airport has a full-time biologist and detailed Wildlife Hazard Management Plan, but Wiley Post airport employs no operations staff and has no wildlife plan, the families say. When birds are reported to Air Traffic Control, they try to harass the birds away from the runways by firing blanks and pyrotechnics.

A 1998 Wildlife Hazard survey of Lake Overholser and nearby reservoirs, lakes and creeks, conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, found the areas to attract thousands of migratory birds and gulls.

The FAA’s Wildlife Strike Database included 11 reported bird strikes for planes taking off from Wiley Post Airport before the crash, and this was only 20 to 25 percent of the strikes that actually occurred, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

The Bird Avoidance Model, a system developed by the Air Force to provide a relative probability (low, moderate or severe) of bird strikes for a particular geographical area based on historical data, indicated a “moderate” risk of bird strikes in the area at the time of the accident, according to the complaint.

The families seek damages for breach of duty, lost income, loss of consortium, and pain and suffering. They are represented by Kevin Hill with the Homsey Law Center.