Imagine this.
You’ve spent the week sight-seeing in New York City, but the time has come to return
home.
Filled with memories of Times Square, Central Park, and the Statue of Liberty, you start
to make your way back to the airport.
So far today though, things haven’t exactly gone to plan.
It’s been freezing cold all day and everything is delayed because of the terrible weather.
After battling through the chilling nineteen degrees temperature, you got to the airport
half an hour early, only to find out your plane had been delayed.
Typical.
It seems like everyone is in the same boat, so the airport is full of people making angry
phone calls, having petty arguments with their family or walking around looking disgruntled.
When it’s finally time to board, the plane is completely full.
You end up in the middle seat.
The guy on your left has a strange smell, and there’s a baby behind you who's already
starting to cry.
“At least it’s only a two-hour journey…” you think to yourself.
So, you put on your earphones to block out the noise of the crying infant and pray you’ll
manage to get a little shut-eye.
When the flight attendant passes, you hide your earphones with your hair so she doesn’t
make you listen to the safety briefing instead of Britney Spears.
You’ve heard it all before, and everyone knows it’s safer to ride a plane than a
car, right?
You look out the window, partly to distract yourself from that guy on your left and partly
to catch your last glimpse of the Big Apple.
With the soothing sound of Britney filling your ears, you start to drift into a restful
slumber as the plane climbs higher.
You watch as the skyscrapers of New York start to look like a model village and the Hudson
River becomes a tiny ribbon.
What a view!
You even see a flock of geese fly past.
“Weird,” you think to yourself; “come to think of it, I’ve never seen birds from
inside an airplane before.”
But then, before you know it, the breath-taking view is replaced by fire, smoke, and a load
of black stuff coming out from what looks to be the engine.
There’s a loud boom as if there’s been an explosion, and the whole plane starts to
shudder and shake.
What’s going on?
Did something happen to the engine?
It couldn’t have been the birds – right?
Believe it or not, this really happened to the unlucky passengers who boarded the US
Airways Flight 1549 back in January 2009.
Just ninety seconds after the flight took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, the
plane met with a flock of Canada geese, some of which were sucked into the plane’s engine.
When a bird hits a plane in the air, it’s known as bird strike.
This could involve birds hitting the forward-facing edges of the vehicle, like the wings or nose
cone – but the most common place the bird hits is the engine.
If this happens, the bird will fall victim to jet engine ingestion, when the unsuspecting
creature is sucked in and swallowed by the machine.
It’s not a pretty sight.
As a passenger, you’re unlikely to see what’s happening if a bird does get ingested.
It happens very quickly, so even if you’re sitting at a window seat near the engine,
all you’ll see is a blur of motion.
Sometimes, that’s it and nothing much will happen.
In extreme cases – like this US Airways flight – you might see flames, smoke, and
blackness from the window.
This happens because of a compressor stall: the engine continues going at first but the
compressor stops being able to control the airflow as it should, meaning the engine can’t
keep itself cool.
Just like when you stall your car, this leads to a lack of engine thrust and vibrations.
In the worst-case scenario, there will be bangs, explosions, and the engine will stop
working altogether.
As well as potentially causing compressor stall, big birds can disrupt the rotary motion
of the fan blades inside the engine, bending or fracturing them.
It might sound far-fetched, but according to the Huffington Post, bird strikes are the
number one threat to planes worldwide.
So, you’re sitting in your seat wondering what’s happening.
As you’re watching the flames and smoke around the engine, the plane starts to shake
violently, and you hear loud bangs.
But you’re still here, and the plane is still moving.
Everything must be fine, right?
Maybe it was just one of the engines that went down...
Then, before you know it, everything goes quiet.
Like, deadly silence: the kind you’re only used to hearing in a library or exam hall.
Nobody is screaming or shouting, they’re all just whispering to each other and looking
to the flight attendants for some kind of instruction.
And, the next thing you know, you realize the plane is going down and not up.
You look out the window again, hoping to see some kind of runway.
Instead, you realize the plane is heading for none other than the Hudson River.
Then there’s a sound you never thought you’d hear.
The sound of the captain rings out: “Brace for impact!”
Most planes have two to four engines – if one goes out of action, the pilot will return
to the airport as a precautionary, but the plane can still function.
In fact, most aircraft can cross half an ocean with only one engine.
Not bad, right?
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just one engine that went out in the case of Flight 1549 – birds
took out all the engines.
See, there are two important factors here: the size of the birds and the number of them.
Engines are actually designed to keep going when they ingest birds, so swallowing a large
number of small birds or a small number of larger birds wouldn’t be much of an issue.
Only around 5% of bird strikes actually cause damage to an airplane.
But the US Airways plane ingested numerous Canadian geese – those are some pretty big
birds.
Another detail to remember is that the plane went down just ninety seconds after leaving
the ground.
That’s because birds fly relatively low in the sky compared to planes, so a collision
is only likely when the plane is close to the ground, like during take-off and landing.
Around three-quarters of bird strikes occur below 150 meters.
Oh, and bird strikes almost always happen during the day since that’s when birds are
flying.
Basically, it takes a very special set of circumstances to line up for birds to not
only be ingested by a plane but also stop every single engine from working.
Heeding the warning to brace for impact, you clutch the chair in front of you for dear
life and duck your head down, wishing you’d paid more attention to the security announcements.
Then the airplane bounces and crashes into the water below.
The impact of hitting the water tears up the plane, and there’s a huge shudder.
Everything goes dark, and you start to feel water flowing against your feet and legs.
Freezing cold water.
Terrified you won’t make it out before the whole plane fills up with water, you jump
up and try to head out through the back exit, but an attendant is shouting at everyone to
go forward instead.
As you make your way up the aisles, the youngest and fittest passengers are jumping and clambering
over seats to get there as quickly as possible.
Within seconds, the water is up to your waist, and by the time you reach the door, you can
see the people at the back of the plane have water up to their shoulders.
As you reach the door, you see the entire cohort of passengers sitting on the wings.
You join them at first, before jumping into a life raft.
There’s a couple of inches of water at the bottom, so it’s freezing to be sat there,
but at least you made it out.
People are holding each other and crying; some look like they can barely hold on for
longer.
But just four or five minutes later, you see safety boats heading your way.
You can scarcely believe it: you made it out alive.
It’s easy to see why Flight 1549 came to be known as the ‘Hudson miracle’.
Despite all the engines failing, every single passenger survived.
It was all thanks to the plane’s pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, also known as ‘Sully’.
Realizing what had happened, Sully was left with three options.
He could turn back to the LaGuardia airport, try to land in the next airport in New Jersey,
or do an emergency landing in the river.
The typical procedure for bird strike is to turn around, but Sully understood he was faced
with a far more serious situation.
Instead, he opted for option three and banked the plane to the left over the George Washington
Bridge, heading to the river.
The rest is history.
You might be wondering how he managed to steer the plane once the engines had already stopped
working.
Well, as long as the wings remain intact, the plane can be flown like normal – during
a normal landing, the pilot pulls the engines to idle anyway.
The challenge was landing in the river as if it was a runway, at exactly the right angle.
Once the plane landed, it was buoyant enough to not sink immediately thanks to being filled
with jet fuel, which is lighter than water.
The role of communication in achieving this incredible feat shouldn’t be neglected,
either.
There are three key mandates in an aviator’s handbook: aviate, navigate, and communicate.
Sully and his co-pilot met their duty to communicate by letting air traffic controllers know what
was happening; this was vital for ensuring first responders were able to arrive at the
scene so quickly.
Communication between the pilots, flight crew and passengers was also essential for keeping
everyone calm.
If the flight attendants hadn’t made sure everyone followed safety procedures correctly
and kept the back door of the plane closed, water might have come flooding in, and the
whole case would be a different story.
So, should we be worried about bird strike?
Yes and no.
The outcome of bird engine ingestion is highly dependent on the circumstances of the flight.
In 2007, a flight from Manchester to Lanzarote suffered engine failure when a bird was ingested
and caught fire, but it returned safely.
On the other hand, an Ethiopian Airlines flight in 1988 sucked in numerous pigeons in take-off
and ended up crashing and killing 35 passengers.
The greatest loss of life happened in 1960 on a flight from Boston, when a flock of starlings
damaged all four engines and the aircraft crashed, killing 62 passengers.
These are somewhat extreme cases, but the phenomenon is more common than you might think.
According to Transport Canada, the bird strikes cost more than $500 million a year in North
America alone, although not all of these cases involve engine ingestion.
But just because they’re frequent, doesn’t make them dangerous.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there have only been 25 human fatalities caused
by wildlife strikes with US aircraft.
The birds, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well.
Is there anything we can do to prevent bird strike?
Not completely, but we can certainly reduce the chances.
An important aspect of this is testing whether planes are airworthy and able to withstand
unexpected collisions – certification criteria require that large engines should be able
to endure the impact of a bird over 3.5kg without serious damage.
Bizarrely, this is often tested by firing fake birds at airplane engines.
It might sound brutal, but it’s an important part of air safety.
It’s even better to avoid these kinds of collisions altogether.
Some airports now have radar-based equipment on the ground to detect birds, and they may
even broadcast the sound of predatory birds or produce loud bangs and flashes of light
to keep them away.
Mechanical falcons, trained falcons, and drones have all been used too.
Kind of like high-tech scarecrows.
Unfortunately, birds always seem to adapt to a new environment and stop being scared
by all the deterrents put in place.
And airports are like a bird’s paradise.
Free food and a large, empty area with a green space nearby?
If you’re a Canadian goose, it doesn’t get much better than that.
The only way to stop birds being ingested by engines completely would be to get rid
of them altogether, but animal rights activists might have something to say about that.
In fact, in the aftermath of the Hudson miracle, airports in New York started culling geese.
Even two snowy owls were shot out of fear they’d fly into an aircraft.
Naturally, this caused some controversy and is no longer considered best practice.
Whatever we do, there’s no way of getting away from freak accidents completely.
As long as there are flying creatures roaming the skies, they might have undesirable collisions
with our flying machines.
So, you don’t need to cancel your next flight due to fear of bird ingestion, but you might
want to pay attention to the safety announcement just in case.
By now you’re probably more than a little cautious about stepping on a plane.
Well, go ahead and cancel that trip to visit family and just stay home with this great
video, or maybe you prefer this other awesome video instead?
Either way, Infographics is definitely safer than flying, so click now!