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Terrorist birds? or just terror?
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In this day and age, no doubt before it was confirmed that it was in fact a flock of birds that caused the NY to NC U.S. Airways flight to make an emergency crash landing in the Hudson River on Thursday, countless initial reactions were “Oh no, not again!”
Fortunately, a terrorist attack on our airplanes wasn’t connected to this incident. Nonetheless, this occurrence, a re-examination of its history, and the likelihood for recurrence, certainly has introduced many of us to a new-fangled fear.
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In the past year alone, seven different airplanes, departing seven different cities, have been involved in incidents regarding encounters with birds. In the past fifteen years, thirty-five people have died as a result of such collisions in the United States. Nearly seven thousand airplanes have been reported to have encounters with birds each year – forty percent of them turning into precautionary landings at either the airport of origin or an alternative site. The number of these reports nearly doubled in the past decade and a half.
The most recent incident at Boston’s Logan Airport was in October 2002, when a Boeing 767, just after take-off, ran into nearly two-dozen Double Crested Cormorants (about thirty inches in length apiece), at least one of which was ingested into the engine. The outcome was similar to the Hudson River landing, although the Boston airplane managed to quickly circle and land relatively close to the tarmac. No one was injured.
This concern is not just within the U.S. Less than two months ago, a Ryanairjet carrying 166 passengers made an emergency landing at Rome’s Ciampino airport after a flock of birds flew into its engines.
According to U.S. Wildlife officials, thriving wildlife numbers have been on a pleasing rise over the past several years, from land and water animals to populations of various large birds, formerly in danger of being depleted or extinct. Conservationists and wildlife experts have been diligent bettering our environment, and studying various wild life survivals and population increases.
Along with the expansion of these species populations, advanced engineering professionals have been doing their own expansions, modernizing airplane technology, and with this, our airplane engines are quieter today than they have ever been before. It’s no surprise when technology meets nature, to share our open skies, they are much more unaware of each other’s presence until they are too near to one another to avoid a catastrophe.
Maybe they were onto something back in the day of one of our ‘caped crusaders’, when those on the street couldn’t decipher what they saw up in the sky…was it a bird?…was it a plane?…The only certainty we know today, is that there was a Superman up there…in the pilot of that aircraft.
Now it will be interesting to see how our traffic controllers, our pilots, our engineers, our wildlife experts, and our innocently, thriving species of birds, join forces to discover how to ensure overall safety in our skies – for all of our travelers, human and animal.
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