Wilbur Wright was the first pilot to record a bird strike (in 1905), and the first fatal crash attributable to a bird strike came seven years later. But to most members of the non-flying public, the first time aircraft bird strikes became newsworthy was probably in 2009, when a flock of Canada geese sent Chesley Sullenberger’s A320 into the Hudson River. In the earlier days of aviation, however, runway foreign object debris (FOD) “strikes” were the prime sources of aircraft damage, from fallen parts, mechanics’ tools, pieces of broken runway surface and other items, with bird-strike damage relatively infrequent. But following WWII, and the introduction of growing numbers of faster and larger aircraft, bird strikes became more noticed. While improved runway surveillance methods–first daily “FOD walks,” then by more frequent vehicle inspections and runway sweepers and, more recently, with the development of automatic alerting radar and video sensors–have kept the inanimate FOD threat down to around four incidents per 10,000 movements, the number of bird strikes has been increasing slowly. Once statistically insignificant, they now account for more than two strikes per 10,000 movements, and are gradually becoming even more frequent.
More In Safety
