Using lights to make aircraft more visible to birds could help reduce the risk of bird strikes, new research by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found. The study, which examined how Canada geese responded to different radio-controlled model aircraft, is the first of its kind and is published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.
Aircraft collisions with wildlife – primarily birds – is a serious
and growing threat to civil and military aviation, as well as an
expensive one: bird strikes cost civil aviation alone more than $1.2
billion a year world-wide.
Although almost all efforts to prevent bird strikes focus on the
airport environment, the fate of US Airways flight 1549 – which was
forced to make a dramatic landing in the Hudson River in New York in
2009 after several Canada geese were sucked into its engines – shows
that effectively reducing bird strikes requires developing strategies
that work far beyond the airport perimetermore www.sciencedaily.com
