The Tech Behind Preventing Airplane Bird Strikes 242
the4thdimension writes "CNN is running an article covering the technology used at Sea-Tac for preventing airplane bird strikes, like the one that occurred weeks ago to the now famous Flight 1549. The hardware used ranges from low-tech pyrotechnics, to netting, to lasers, to avian radar. Using a combination of all these technologies, Sea-Tac believes they save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in avoiding dangerous bird strikes."
Re:What about (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been looked into extensively already, any screen fine enough to prevent smaller birds from getting sucked into the engine has a massive effect on the engine's performance.
It was more than one bird (Score:5, Interesting)
Most birds use parallax to get their 3D cues. Think about it, for something that lives in full 3D space, most birds do not have stereoscopic vision. Their eyes are wide apart facing opposite directions with very little overlap. If the plane approaches the birds in such a way that the bearing (direction, angle) of the plane as seen by the bird is constant, the bird thinks the plane is part of the background, it is at infinity! That is why they don't take evasive action. If we put a series of LED lights along the length of the plane and turn them off and on to produce streaks of lights running from nose to tail, it will interrupt their visual cues and make the plane stand out from the background. That will give cues to the birds about the real position of the airplane. They will avoid us, we don't have to avoid them.
Pointless (Score:5, Interesting)
Great effort on the part of SeaTac to keep birds off the runway. But it wouldn't have made a damned bit of difference to Flight 1549. From what I've seen online (not quite the official FAA report, but probably close enough), the bird strikes occurred several miles from the runway at around 3000 ft altitude.
In the case of SeaTac, approach and departure altitudes like these are seen as far away from the airport as 20 miles. On a few occasions, I've been watching little Piper Cubs/Cessnas/whatever buzzing around over my house at 3 to 5000 ft altitudes and seen a 747 fly in on approach to SeaTac underneath them. And I'm more than 20 miles from the airport. Its not likely that the FAA can keep the air clear of Canadian geese, bald eagles and other such birds over an area of more than 1200 square miles.
The only solution to preventing another 1549 incident is to keep commercial aircraft at higher altitudes for as long as possible.
Re:Not that hard. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not that hard. (Score:5, Interesting)
You joke, but this general problem has come up in the past.
Back in the old days when trains were the major form of transportation, there were snowblower engines called Elliot-Jull rotary snowplows [narhf.org] that looked pretty much like the compressor sections of jet engines. The blades spun like mad and they cut paths through deep snow. Sometimes the snow would actually be 8 meters deep when they finally got a rotary to it, so they were just smashing into a wall of snow (literally: they'd put three or four engines behind one of these and get up a head of steam (the origin of the term) and smash into a snowfield.)
The problem was that often the railroad bed was sheltered, because they'd cut it through a hill, so a herd of cattle or deer would take cover in the shelter and get buried alive by the snowfall, and then the rotary would come through and run into them.
A flock of seagulls, or even canada geese, is nothing compared to 200 head of cattle, chopped into fragments and then frozen again when the rotary stalled on the debris. They'd have to tow it into the nearest shop and break out the blowtorches, and basically rebuild the entire front of the engine.