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slash R L l humans have always been a
little jealous of birds at least to an
extent for thousands of years we looked
up at them and envied their ability to
fly and wondered what the world might
look like from up there birds were
beautiful majestic creatures full of
wisdom and eventually we managed to
build a machine capable of seeing the
world as they saw it the airplane it was
only afterwards though that we
discovered birds are kind of dicks even
Orville Wright struggled with birds
hitting his plane in 1905 and in a 1911
air race between France and Madrid a
pilot found himself getting attacked
mid-air by an eagle which he drove away
by shooting at it with his pistol in
1912 the first recorded fatality of a
bird strike on an airplane took place
when a goal got stuck in the plane's
controls which caused the pilot to
tragically crash decades later in 1960
Eastern Airlines flight 375 took off
from Boston and flew through a flock of
birds which severely damaged all four of
the plane's engines and caused it to
crash into Boston Harbor resulting in
the loss of life of 62 people on board
and representing the deadliest known
incident ever caused by birds but it's
not just the engines that birds are
capable of causing damage - in 2004 a
KLM flight two party from Amsterdam
skiffle suffered a bird strike to their
nose landing gear deering take off since
the landing gear ended up being
retracted normally they continued on to
their destination at Barcelona but upon
landing the plane veered unexpectedly
off the runway and crashed the cause was
later determined to be a cut cable in
the nose wheel steering system caused by
that bird strike and while everybody
aboard the plane survived the plane
itself was destroyed and ridden off as a
total loss but perhaps the most famous
incident of a bird strike on an airplane
was back in 2009 when US Airways flight
1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in
new you
and quickly ran into a flock of geese
many of which got stuck in the plane's
engines which caused a complete power
failure unable to reach any airport the
pilots thankfully managed to guide the
plane into a ditched landing in the
Hudson River and saved everybody on
board but the results could have
obviously been way worse and it's not
just airplanes that birds hit either in
1999 Italian supermodel and pony
look-alike Fabio got hit in the face by
a bird that broke his nose while he was
enjoying a roller coaster and in the
1960 Belgian Grand Prix a driver for
Lotus got hit in his face by a bird
while going through a corner just too
tight which caused him to crash
it's estimated that just in the United
States alone about 13,000 birds will
strike an airplane every year and cause
about 400 million dollars in damages
worldwide it's believed that bird
strikes caused about 1.2 billion dollars
of damage more than the price of two
brand new Airbus a380 800s so what makes
bird strike so damaging and what can we
do to stop them most bird strikes on
airplanes occur during takeoff or
landing at lower altitudes where birds
are more common to be that's not to say
that they only happen here though there
wasn't instance a while back where a
pilot flying over Ivory Coast at 11,000
300 meters unexpectedly crashed into a
vulture which also happens to be the
highest recorded altitude of a bird ever
measured birds generally make impact on
any part of the front facing part of a
plane so the windscreen the nose wings
and engines are the areas that are most
often hit the engines in particular
though are the most vulnerable a bird
getting ingested into one is dangerous
because as the bird strikes one of the
blades of the fan inside that blade can
become displaced into another blade
which causes a cascading engine failure
the fans inside of the engines are
spinning at their high speed during
takeoff where the presence of birds are
also most common and therefore makes for
the most vulnerable period flocks of
birds provide for more opportunities of
one causing a cascading engine failure
since multiple strikes are likely to
occur
but what can be done to mitigate this
from happening airports around the world
employ various techniques to keep birds
away including making food ha
to access keeping birds of prey or guard
dogs present as a visual deterrent using
fake effigies of predators and speaker
systems playing predator noises using
cannons and pyrotechnics to make loud
scary noises placing sharp spikes on
areas where birds may perch up on to
deny them anywhere convenient to land or
by bringing in sharpshooters with rifles
or shotguns to keep their populations in
check
JFK Airport in New York used to
experience a problem with a nearby
colony of gulls flying overhead that was
contributing up to 315 bird strikes on
airplanes their per year so they brought
in snipers to begin shooting the birds
as they flew over in 1991 hoping that it
would encourage them to change their
flight path to somewhere else within two
years they had shot down over 28,000 of
those goals which was about half of the
population of the colony and bird
strikes on planes were reduced by 89% a
more humane method of avoiding bird
strikes though has been the recent
development of avian radar which is
surprisingly powerful the Dutch military
for example has developed a system that
they call radar observation of bird
intensity or Robin for short
Robin is capable of tracking thousands
of birds simultaneously in real time day
and night with 360-degree coverage out
to a range of 10 kilometres updating
every single Birds position speed
heading and size every 2 to 3 seconds
deployment of Robin by the Royal
Netherlands Air Force at air bases has
been proven to reduce bird strikes by
50% as air traffic controllers are able
to better alert pilots to flock of birds
nearby during takeoff and landing
procedures still the impacts of birds on
planes when they do hit can be pretty
devastating the force of an impact
depends greatly on the weight of the
bird the speed difference between it and
the plane and the direction of the
impact the energy of the impact
increases with the square of the speed
difference which is why a low speed
impact of a small bird on a car
windshield causes very little damage
while a high speed impact with a jet can
cause catastrophic damage learning how
and why airplanes or cars work is
interesting and while I'm not really
qualified to tell you any of that there
are courses over at brilliance that are
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much for watching