NYC to kill 2,000 Canadians for aviation safety

I came across this interesting article today while I was killing some time at work.

NYC to kill 2,000 Canada geese for aviation safety

Quote:

New York City plans to trap and kill up to 2,000 Canada geese this summer in an attempt to avoid the type of collision that caused a jet to ditch in the Hudson River in January.

The hunt will take place on dozens of city properties within eight kilometres of Kennedy and LaGuardia airports.

Aviation officials have culled the bird flocks on airport property for years, but this will mark a major expansion of the effort into other parts of the city, including about 40 public parks.

The roundup is being timed with the molting season, when the geese can't fly. It is scheduled to begin within a week. The geese will be gassed.

U.S. Airways Flight 1549 had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York on Jan. 15 and climbed to almost 1,000 metres when the plane hit a flock of Canada geese and lost thrust in both engines.

Capt. Chesley Sullenberger decided to ditch into the Hudson rather than risk crashing in the densely populated area of New York and New Jersey. Everyone aboard survived.

I guess I'm the type of person that is an animal lover, but not to the point of being a member of PETA (fuck those guys).

I can understand the reasoning behind this. When you run an airline its absolutely necessary to ensure the safety of all your passengers. You want to try to minimize as much risk as humanly possible because you don't want to do anything to put the crew and passengers lives in danger.

I just keep thinking to myself, is killing 2000 birds really going to solve anything, they're probably just going to come back to the area anyway. I also came across this article as well related to this one.

No Way to Tell How Many Birds Hit Planes

Quote:

Experts say only 20 percent of bird strikes get reported.

A lack of mandatory reporting procedures means no one really knows how many birds strike planes each year and where those incidents occur most often, according to aviation authorities.

Experts said only 20 percent of bird strikes are ever reported, and some airports are more conscientious than others about keeping track of them. This means what data is available may be skewed and thus be an unreliable indicator of which airport and airspaces have the greatest problems with wildlife incursions.

The Federal Aviation Administration maintains a list of bird strikes by airport but when contacted by ABCNews.com, the agency declined to release that information.

Bird strikes are in the public eye after the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 Thursday in New York's Hudson River because of a bird strike in both engines of the Airbus A-310 jet. All 155 people onboard survived the flight, which originated at New York's LaGuardia airport.

Eastern Region spokesman Jim Peters told ABCNews.com today that the FAA has confidentiality agreements with the airports, the airlines and air traffic controllers. That agreement, he said, allows the FAA to collect information to improve safety and encourages accurate and timely reporting of incidents.

Such confidentiality, he said, means "we don't have to pull teeth to get the information." It also means the public can't get access to some types of safety data.

Archie Dickey, an Embry-Riddle Aviation University professor who prepared FAA's database but was not authorized to release the contents, said there's a feeling in the community that if airports report every bird strike they will be criticized for poor management.

And that makes the airport that does the best job of reporting look like the worst in aviation safety.

Airports are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible, said Sean Broderick, spokesman for the Virginia-based American Association of Airport Executives. But it is completely voluntary.

"Understanding the problem … means understanding what the birds are doing," he said.

According to the FAA, since 2000, at least 486 commercial aircraft have collided with birds, leading to 166 emergency landings and 66 aborted takeoffs.

"Nobody outside the airport or aviation world thinks about this stuff until something happens," Broderick said. His organization represents 850 airports in the United States.

Making the Skies Safer

But airports have undertaken costly efforts to make their runways and surrounding skies safer -- from canons to dogs to specially trained falcons and habitat mitigation.

Orlando International Airport, he said, worked with the University of Florida to remove all the fish from storm water ponds near the airport so larger birds, such as cranes, wouldn't be attracted to the area.

There are some clues to bird strike patterns, however.

"There's more chance of an occurrence of a strike in the eastern part of the country, on the coast," Dickey said.

There are three main flyways in the United States -- routes that migratory birds take to fly south for the winter and north during warmer weather, he said.

One, seemingly the most populous, runs along the eastern seaboard. The other two are on the West Coast and down the middle of the country.

By simple reasoning, Dickey said, planes that fly along these routes increase their chances of getting hit. But unfortunately for East Coast birds and fliers, that area also has the most concentrated air traffic.

The growing population of birds makes the situation worse. While migratory birds used to be the most common cause of aviation hits, the number of resident birds has grown exponentially in the last three decades as larger urban areas provide them with fewer natural predators and more places to survive the winter months -- buildings, golf courses and parks, to name a few.

Dickey said it is estimated that the number of resident birds has increased by 7.3 percent, or several million birds, between 2008 and 2006.

Geese, which were thought to be the species that took down Flight 1549, are in the top 10, he said, of most populous species in the United States.

'Variety' of Ways for Birds to Take a Plane Down

Bird strikes happen every day and can be deadly, with more than 200 people killed since 1988 because of airborne collisions with birds, according to the Bird Strike Committee USA.

"There's a variety of ways a bird can take down an airplane," said John Ostrom of the Metropolitan Airports Commission at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, who's also chairman of the Bird Strike Committee.

Birds can disable planes, Ostrom said, by flying into the engines and shutting them down. They can also penetrate the windshield or other parts of the fuselage, causing pilots to lose control.

And apparently when it comes to collisions with birds, size doesn't always matter.

"There have been instances where birds the size of robins bring a plane down, all the way up to Canada geese," Ostrom said.

Even when birds don't cause death, injury or drama such as Thursday's Hudson River rescue, they do cost airplane owners money.

The FAAs Web site on Airport Wildlife Mitigation says that bird strikes do more than $300 million of damage to aircraft each year.

While there are wildlife mitigation options for airports, there's not much a pilot can do to avoid birds in the air.

"You're not going to move the airplane like you're moving a car or moving a bike," Ostrom said. "When you're moving something at 100 mph, it's pretty much straight on."

One of my responsibilities as an environmental monitor is to report any wildlife sightings and try to do whatever necessary to ensure the safety of the wildlife but to ensure the safety of all the people working on the ground. Now obviously its a lot easier to manage a person's safety when it comes to wildlife on the ground compared to being up in the air.

We had an incident fairly close to where I work about a year ago, when 500 ducks had landed in a tailings pond and majority of them died. This was due to the fact that an air horn blaster was not set up in time. I have been on enough oil sands sites to know that these air horn blasters actually do the job.

I think that even if you kill a large population of birds, I believe it is not going to solve the problem because they'll just keep coming back. I would like to see more environmentally friendly ways to limit this problem, but I think they have exhausted a lot of options, and even though some of them work, we're always going to have problems with bird strikes on airplanes. I just don't personally want to see the death of 2000 animals, but if it protects the sanctity of human life then I guess it has to be done to ensure a safe traveling environment.

To the GFF community, how do you feel about this particular issue. Can you think of any other ways to mitigate the amount of aircraft/bird collisions.

Jam it back in, in the dark.