
Why we can't stop birds downing aircraft - alexandros
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16438-comment-why-we-cant-stop-birds-downing-aircraft.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
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sokoloff
I wonder if selectable inertial separator would work on turbofans. (They are
installed on single-engine PT-6 turboprops.) Imagine a system that requires
air to make a sharp turn, but anything with significant mass (water, ice,
birds) would pass through, or get ground up against something other fan
blades. I couldn't find a good diagram online.

You would want them to be selectable (engaged during low-altitude flight,
stowed during cruise flight) so as to hopefully not unduly hurt range, other
than via the increased weight.

The problem though is that there are significant one-engine-out climb
performance targets that must be met for Part 21 certification, and inertial
separators have power penalties on top of the weight penalty. Taking
performance away from a one-engine-out scenario would further restrict max
take-off weights, increase balanced field lengths (meaning some airports would
need to make improvements to serve some aircraft, etc), increase the time from
roll to V1 (the takeoff commit speed) and at the end of the day, taking
performance away may represent a higher risk than birds currently represent.

In 700 hours or so of single-engine piston flight, I've struck two (small)
birds, and had close calls with half-dozen more. I've never had a close call
with a bird over 2000 feet AGL, so cruise flight could surely be done without
brid protection.

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stcredzero
Taking performance away also directly impacts the bottom line of airlines and
airplane manufacturers, so highly unlikely.

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sokoloff
So does dunking a $60mm jet in the Hudson River. :)

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staunch
If the airlines have heavier (but safer) planes their costs go up. If they
lose a plane it's probably their insurance company that pays for it, I'd
think. Maybe their premium goes up though? Wouldn't be the first time people's
lives were on the bad end of a cost/benefit analysis.

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sokoloff
Hypothesize two airlines, one flying current airliners and the other flying
airliners that are 0.5% safer and whose tickets are 5-10% more expensive.

Who do you think gets all the business on competing routes? Filling even 5%
more seats on average dramatically improves airlines P&L statements.

I'm not saying it's rational, but big businesses have been built on the
inability of the average person to do math. (Airport insurance kiosks,
lotteries, pachinko parlors, or Las Vegas/Macao.)

(I'm also not suggesting that there's an easy way to get that 1 in 200
improvement in safety, even at a 10% cost penalty, but if your airline gets a
reputation for bad safety, you're all but done, even if you come up on the top
of Expedia/Travelocity/ITA searches when sorted by price...)

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wheels
Which is one of the reasons the FAA exists. It's probably not the best idea to
let airline safety get sorted out by market forces.

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patio11
If market forces increased the number of deaths from air travel by .5% for 10%
off ticket prices, I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing.
There's value in cheaper travel, and it might even be value that saves a life
-- granted, the kid in Africa who died this morning of starvation because his
mother is unemployed because his country is not a tourist destination because
it costs too much to go there did not die in a photo-friendly fireball, but is
his death any less meaningful?

LOTS of very useful things will kill far more people this year than commercial
air travel. Water buckets. Bicycles. Doctors. Cars, in about the first two
hours of the year.

(If you took a Boeing 747 full of American patients to a doctor's office, more
than one would die due to medical error. Remember that checklists article from
yesterday?)

Air travel gets the evil eye because the deaths are very visible. The same
factor would make market-regulated air travel very safe.

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stcredzero
Bonus points for explaining how market forces would encourage surgeons to use
checklists.

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patio11
"This is your malpractice insurance company. We just read an interesting
article in the newspaper about how using checklists cuts fatalities by 50%. So
we checked our data, and found this is accurate. Great news!

If you don't use checklists, your premium next year will triple."

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stcredzero
Cool. Now, what are the pitfalls?

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ryanwaggoner
Why don't we just outfit aircraft with a miniature Phalanx system that
calculates the trajectory of an incoming bird and the probability of an engine
strike and then fires up a Gatling gun to neutralize the threat :)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS>

In all seriousness, I wonder if some kind of laser-based defense system could
be used as a last resort.

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jm4
I'd say it's a ways off considering how many years they've spent trying to
shoot down much larger missiles with lasers. A missile moves much faster than
a bird, but the small size of a bird is going to make it extremely difficult.
There's also the issue of how to deal with a flock of birds. This, of course,
is assuming you've figured out how to cost-effectively equip hundreds of
passenger jets with lasers and the necessary tracking systems given the space
constraints. I understand power is also an issue when shooting down missiles.
I'm not sure how significantly this requirement is reduced when shooting down
birds.

There's also the issue of using a weapon over heavily populated areas and at
low altitude. Shooting down a missile will probably take place at high
altitude. It's also possible, or even likely, that it will take place over a
sparsely populated area or war zone. It could even be over an ocean. The laser
might even be fired upwards. If you're shooting down birds from a plane
there's a good chance you're going to be firing a laser outward or downward.
What if you miss and start blasting holes through nearby buildings?

Bird strikes tend to be a problem most often during takeoff and landing--
usually at either end of the runway. Planes gain altitude so quickly that it's
rarely a problem outside of a couple short windows as the plane is approaching
or leaving the runway area. I remember reading about an airport with an
especially bad bird problem that had success using dogs to keep birds away
from the runways.

I think there is a simple solution to this. It might even be possible to put
plants or grass around the runway that birds don't like. What about something
with thorns that will be difficult for a bird to perch on? Or maybe something
with a particular scent that birds will stay away from?

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dag
I suggest using predator birds and (directable) loud noise, either high-
pitched or predator birdcalls.

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rtra
That could be a perfect solution, but given the high relative speeds it's
probably not possible. I take it must be pretty difficult to detect even a
flock of birds at the the necessary distance.

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jm4
It could be effective on the ground around the runway where the birds hang out
until a plane flies into them.

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endtime
>International Civil Aviation Organisation regulations say that jet engines
must be able to ingest a small bird without problems. But for large birds, the
rules say only that the engine must not explode.

This is probably the best passage I've read all week.

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furyg3
Do we need to list all the contingencies when an engine must not explode?
Can't that be just a general requirement of engines?

Edit: On second thought, I suppose jet engines are generally in a constant
state of exploding. Maybe the rule should be "Upon ingestion of a large bird,
_keep_ exploding".

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nuclear_eclipse
_"Interestingly, the Smithsonian Institution's Feather Identification
Laboratory has worked out which species causes the most costly birdstrike
damage. It's the turkey vulture - the bird that originally inspired the Wright
brothers."_

Irony strikes again!

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yan
Irony is coincidentally the name of the turkey vulture.

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thomasmallen
If I were any kind of ornithologist, I'd devise a sensory device (human-
inaudible sound, most likely) that would frighten the birds away, possible via
mimicry of a predator.

Note that this is an excerpt of a comment I made on the news article page.

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spolsky
they do this at JFK all the time

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paul7986
This makes me extremely weary of flying, as you can deter birds on take off
through sound deterrents on the ground, but not while in the sky. Birds may
have even become conditioned to the sound of our noisy flight, thus not
deterring them away from airplanes.

There is a entrepreneurial/engineer solution needed here! They rule out adding
grilles due to fuel inefficiency, but what about rigging airplanes with the
sound deterrents used on the ground - bird radar triggers these sounds? Just a
thought...they'd probably have to be crazy insane loud.

I hope someone creates a solution soon! I dont want to land my next flight in
the Hudson (chances are slim but still)!

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yan
Talk about misplacing your fears.. Airplanes typically cruise at around 33,000
feet; there are no birds that high. All bird-related accidents happen upon
take-off and landing, but even then they are _barely_ a threat. The numbers I
heard, in the last twenty years or so, there have been about two hundred
deaths _world-wide_ due to birds colliding with airplanes and I'm not sure
what percentage of that is for commercial airliners versus general aviation.
Birds hitting airplanes is probably the least-likely way you can perish.

I'll even bet $5,000 of my own money that neither you, nor anyone you
personally know will be killed by a bird colliding with an aircraft, ever.

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tome
I'll take that bet, please.

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biohacker42
I recall very, very old news footage of raptor eye like structures being
attached to jet engines.

I guess those didn't work.

What about doing a good job of keeping the airports and areas around them free
or large flocks?

How much would it cost to have trained hawks patrol the area.

NY already has wild raptors living in the city.

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mattmaroon
I don't think the problem are flocks of large geese living in the area, it's
them migrating through. Hawks probably couldn't solve that problem, and if you
have any ideas as to how to keep Canada Geese away, you should consider doing
it as a startup. They're a common pest in my area of the country.

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biohacker42
That's actually a good idea.

I bet even migrating flocks would scatter if a raptor buzzes them.

So perhaps I should get into falconry and charge airports to have my falcon
fly through any migrating flocks.

It would be almost like being a super villain.

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mattmaroon
I don't know. They might just keep flying. What does a flock do when a
predator comes and snags one?

Also, if they're in a flock you can probably avoid them more easily than if
they scatter.

Keeping raptors around permanently would be problematic. For one, they're
probably just as rough on an engine. And for another, how do you feed them for
the other 11 months of the year? And do they even eat birds that big?

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forgottenpswrd
How about fireworks?

A firework gun that can set at what altitude the fireworks go off and then
launch them.

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ivankirigin
The US and Israelis are working on lasers to take out mortars. They are radar
based, which would make hitting birds harder. But a vision system tied to the
lasers could probably drop a bird before it gets sucked into the turbines.

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amichail
I thought the a380 has flexible engine blades that bend temporarily upon a
bird strike. I wonder if its engines would have shut down with a similar bird
strike as the one that occurred yesterday.

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bprater
Cool, I was wondering that exact thing yesterday: why no jet engine grill? Not
all engineering problems are solvable! (Or should be solved.)

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ryanwaggoner
I wonder if anyone has looked at doing a cone-shaped grill that extends
forward some distance beyond the front of the engine. It would look goofy as
hell, but it would only have to be strong enough to survive a glancing impact,
rather than a direct hit like a flat grill. Air resistance might be an issue
though...

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anewaccountname
Are we playing 20 questions or something? Just come out with it; the name you
are looking for is cow catcher.

