Air Force Uses Falcons To Protect Falcons 148
coondoggie writes "Birds and high-performance jet aircraft don't mix. So at a base in Germany, the Air Force is fighting birds with birds — specifically trained falcons that patrol the base and help eliminate at least some of the feathered threat to the F-16 Fighting Falcons and other aircraft."
And have been for decades (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, decades old news on the front page of slashdot
Re:old practice (Score:3, Insightful)
Unobvious sources make for bad leads... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, a story about airplanes and airports from Network World, perhaps that should of been a huge clue that it wasn't really news, novel, or particularly interesting.
And the RCAF or Canadian Air Force routinely uses them as well for their airplanes as well.
Re:What's next? (Score:4, Insightful)
I credit the people more so than the equipment.
Not to diminish their contribution, but you are mis-attributing a lot. The A-10 is widely considered to be far less survivable than many WWI aircraft. In fact, most all of the survivability features you attribute to the A-10 came directly from common WWII ally aircraft attributes. One of the reasons why WWII aircraft are more survivable is they didn't use extremely fragile turbines.
Historically, WWII is the apex of aircraft survivability because of our transition to jets and then again with fly by wire and hydraulics. When a new ground attack vehicle was required (aka, the A-10), they looked back in time to re-learn what made an aircraft highly survivable. And when they looked back, they almost exclusively looked at WWII aircraft. Almost all of the survivability features in the A-10 are simply re-imaginings and modernizations of WWII ideas and technology.
I can authoritatively tell you, there has yet to be an A-10 come home in anywhere near as bad of shape as many ally bombers did. Events like this, while not daily fair, were not all that uncommon. [youtube.com]