ITEM OF THE WEEK

BIRD STRIKE!

Captain Sully’s “Miracle on the Hudson” in 2009 made almost everyone aware of the danger of bird strikes on airplanes. What some may not appreciate is that birds (and other animals) have often been a threat, and a number of (expensive) tactics have been used to prevent them. The tactics work, most of the time.

There is also an invasive species aspect to this problem….

Birds vs. Airplanes: A Brief History

The first powered airplane flight was on December 17, 1903; Orville Wright was the pilot. The Wrights came back to Dayton to refine and showcase their new invention. On September 7, 1908, Orville was circling a cornfield near home and caused a flight of crows to come up. Orville hit and killed one of them; fortunately causing no significant damage to his flimsy airplane.

In 1911, French pilot Eugene Gilbert was accosted by an angry eagle during a Paris-Madrid air race. The eagle harassed him until Gilbert scared it off with shots from his pistol.

Famed pilot Calbraith Rodgers, the first person to fly across the United States, was not so lucky. His plane struck a gull over Long Beach, California. The bird lodged in his control cables, causing him to crash into the ocean and drown.

The danger of bird strikes grew significantly as aircraft flew faster and faster. Even Astronauts were not exempt. Group 3 selectee Theodore Freeman was piloting a T-38 on the morning of October 31, 1964, returning to Ellington Field outside Houston, when he hit a goose in the fog. The bird was ingested into his port-side air intake causing it to flame out and the T-38 to pitch down. Freeman ejected horizontally, giving his parachute too little time to deploy properly. His widow found out about the crash from a reporter; Freeman was buried at Arlington.

Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-114) hit a turkey vulture shortly after lift-off on July 26, 2005. Fortunately, the impact was on the external fuel tank, not the Discovery itself, whose fragile insulating tiles might have sustained far more damage than the hit by insulation foam the caused the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia a few years later.

A recent analysis of bird strikes for the three-year period of 2022-2024 was conducted, developing an international database with 214,734 bird strikes. Since many were minor, and the U.S. and some other countries do not mandate reporting, the actual number is likely much higher. Bird strike damage to commercial aircraft costs at least $1 billion annually worldwide!

Fatalities due to bird strikes are fairly rare, but some do happen, and some generate significant legal responses. Examples include (legal issues marked with *):

12 December 1973*: A Falcon business jet struck a number of gulls just after take-off and crashed in Norwich, England. Those aboard suffered minor injuries, but the aircraft was destroyed. The injured and aircraft owner successfully sued for damages.
14 June 1975*: A Sabreliner business jet hit a group of gulls on take-off from the Watertown NY airport. Three of the six aboard were hurt, and the aircraft was destroyed. As in the 1973 case, the injured and aircraft owner sued successfully.
3 June 1995*: An Air France Concorde struck a group of Canadian Geese (the same as Sully hit) on landing at JFK Airport in New York. Two of the Concorde’s engines were destroyed, but there were no injuries to those aboard. Airport authorities had failed to warn the pilots of a possible bird hazard. Air France sued for damages and won a small settlement; the lawyers involved were the real winners.
15 Sep 1988 - Ethiopian Airlines 604: Struck several birds during climb-out and crashed on approach to the airport. Thirty-five passengers died.
22 September 1995: A Dassault Falcon 20 business jet lost an engine and crashed after it hit several lapwings while landing at Paris-Le Burget Airport. All ten people aboard perished.
22 September 1995: A USAF E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft struck a group of Canadian Geese during take-off from Elmendorf AFB in Alaska. Both engines on the port side of the aircraft were destroyed, causing the AWACS to crash two miles from the runway. All 24 crew members aboard perished.
4 January 2009: A Sikorsky S-76 helicopter flying across Louisiana hit a red-tailed hawk, causing the engines to lose power. Nine of the ten people aboard died in the resulting crash; the other person sustained serious injuries.
The worst bird strike crash occurred on December 29, 2024. A Boeing 737 flying from Bangkok to Muan, South Korea flew into a flock of birds when on final approach. The aircraft made the runway, but damage caused it to overrun the runaway at high speed, where it hit a concrete structure supporting landing-assist equipment (improperly but not illegally placed). All passengers and most of the crew were killed, 279 in all; only two flight attendants strapped-in in the tail section survived.

The above are merely a sampling of some of the worst accidents caused by bird strikes.

Not Just Airplanes

Other-fast moving things can suffer damaging bird strikes, too. For example:

The Mercedes-Benz W194 driven by Karl Kling and Hans Klenk in the 1953 Carrera Panamericana auto race was doing ~120 MPH when they hit a vulture, shattering the wind screen and rendering co-driver Klenk briefly unconscious.
A large bird struck driver Alan Stacey during the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix, causing a fatal crash.
Dale Earnhart hit a seagull during the 1991 Daytona 500 race, causing only superficial damage to his car.
During the first day of operation of the high-speed roller coaster Apollo’s Chariot (Busch Gardens Williamsburg), rider Fabio Lanzoni suffered minor injuries when he was hit in the face by a bird (30 March 1999).

And Not Just Birds

A large majority of the animals striking aircraft are birds, but there are occasions where deer (primarily) and other large animals were hit on the runway during take-off or landing. Some odd examples follow:

February 6, 1966: The deadliest aircraft crash in the Dominican Republic was not caused by birds or other animals; the culprits were wasps. A Boeing 757 had been parked on the tarmac at Gregorio Luperon International Airport for twenty days, during which a swarm of wasps took up residence in the pitot tubes that provide flight and engine information to the aircraft electronics. The wasp-clogged tubes fed wrong airspeed info, which resulted in a crash shortly after take-off. Comical, perhaps, but not when you consider the crash killed all 180 passengers and crew on the aircraft.
2004: A Cessna 172 collided with a giraffe on the Santawani Airstrip near the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The pilot was unhurt, the Cessna was wrecked, and the giraffe was killed.
2013: Three cows wandered onto the runway at Jalaluddin Airport on Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, into the path of a landing Lion Air flight. The plane hit and killed one of the cows and slid off the runway. Nobody aboard, and the other two cows, survived unhurt.
Deer strikes and close calls are fairly common, especially at smaller airports in deer country, but moose are another matter. On 26 March 2015, a Beech 1900 hit a moose at the Fort St. James Airstrip in British Columbia. The moose tore up the plane pretty badly, and vice-versa.
Kangaroos laugh at fences, to their detriment. On January 14, 2020, a mob of ‘roos hopped onto the runway at Maitland Airport, right in the path of a Beech 58 Baron on final approach. The impacts tore up the plane a bit, but nobody aboard was injured.
The four aircraft above were small ones. However, a LATAM Brazil Airbus 320-200 managed to hit a capybara while departing from the Sao Paulo Airport on January 7, 2021. The aircraft was not significantly damaged by the impact with the 60-pound rodent, but runway cleanup caused a number of flight delays.

Bird Strike Remedies

A variety of tactics are used to mitigate the severity of bird strikes. They fall into two broad categories: preventing the strike and lessening the damage of any strike.

Preventing the Strike: Non-lethal Methods

Wild animals and birds have their own agenda, so wildlife management to keep them away from active runways is really important. Both non-lethal and lethal tactics are used.

Habitat

Vegetation and water attract birds and other wildlife. It is often impossible to completely control plants and water, it is possible to plant grasses unpalatable to birds around runway areas and keep it mowed so as not to attract rodents and those that would feed on them. Standing water can be diverted, or covered with floating material or wire grids.

Exclusion

Tall perimeter fencing and cattle guards can deter incursion by deer, moose, and other larger animals. Nets can be used to make hangars and other structures unsuitable for roosting.

Visual / Auditory Repellents / Harassment

Flashing lights, scarecrows, propane cannons, pyrotechnics, and bioacoustics such as artificial predator calls are used to make airport areas undesirable for animals and birds. Places where birds can land can be protected by spikes and other blocks. Dogs and/or predatory birds can be used to control/manage large bird populations, but require careful use so as to not make the dogs/birds a problem on their own.

Chemical War

Two chemical repellents are authorized for use at airports, methyl anthranilate, which targets birds transiting through the area, and anthraquinone, which has a strong laxative effect that works well on birds residing in the airport’s area.

Relocation

Lots of paperwork is required to capture and move animals due to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940. And most of the larger birds don’t take the hint too readily….

Lethal Methods

Killing animals and birds near airports is largely ineffective and is unpopular in general with the public. The only successful lethal program I could find was controlled shooting of deer that live in abundance near an airport, such has been used with success at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

It’s Not Nice to Fool With Mother Nature!

I left out one tragic example of a bird strike that caused an awful fatal accident.

On October 4, 1960, 66 years ago to the day as I write this, Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Logan International Airport in Boston. It was a Lockheed L-188 Electra, a large passenger airplane with four piston-driven engines.

Two weeks earlier, W.H. Jenkins, another pilot flying the same model airplane, had to abort his take-off from Logan because he had hit a large flock of starlings during his take-off roll. He reported, “They hit the front of the airplane, resembling machine-gun fire. There wasn’t a square-inch of my windshield that wasn’t splattered. I couldn’t see a thing.”

Eastern Airlines Flight 375, unlike Jenkins’ plane, was already airborne before it hit a massive flock of starlings. Engine 1 (port outboard) failed completely, clogged with many starlings. Engines 2 and 4 (port inboard and starboard outboard) lost power temporarily. The unbalanced and reduced engine thrust caused the airplane to cease climbing and roll to the left. The pilots, likely blinded by a starling-covered wind screen, could not save the aircraft, and crashed in fairly shallow water. Sixty-two of the 72 souls aboard died, many by drowning.

The construction of commercial aircraft was relatively primitive by today’s standards. Many of the mountings of the seats of the victims broke under the strain of the impact, and many of the victims drowned strapped to their seats in a tangled jumble. Post-crash investigators weren’t sure, but they suspected that the failure of the mount of the co-pilots chair, which was found broken, may have contributed to the crash. They found a design/construction flaw in the mounts of the pilots’ chairs; if the co-pilot had tromped hard on the rudder pedal immediately after the impact, his chair would have slid backward, causing him to pull back on the wheel, accentuating a stall.

But this crash never should have happened at all. Because the starlings should not have ben there. Starlings are not native to North America. They were an invasive species. And they still are a major nuisance. More on that later. But first…

The Perils of Invasive Species

The National Invasive Species Information Center defines “invasive species” as “plants, animals, and other living organisms (e.g.), microbes that is:

non-native (or alien) to the ecosystem under consideration and,
whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.”

I would expand that definition to include harmful to an existing ecosystem, even those unrelated to human health.

Some alien species of animals and plants are introduced accidentally, others are introduced on purpose, almost always for misguided reasons.

First, two examples of an accidental introduction of an alien species into another area. Zebra mussels are native to the Black and Caspian Seas in Central Asia. They attached themselves to the hulls of cargo ships and were distributed wherever those ships went, including infesting the Great Lakes region, crowding out native competition. The Purple Loosestrife plant came to the USA in earthen ballast used in stabilizing ships at sea, and has spread wildly.

Other species were introduced as a matter of convenience. An example is the Burmese Python, once a popular pet until it grew too large. The owner couldn’t flush their way out of the problem, so they released the snakes into the wild, where, in some places, the flourished. The pythons love the Everglades and wetlands in the South, growing to up to 20 feet in length and decimating native wading bird populations.

Sometimes invasive species are introduced accidentally to an area where they are not native. Examples include the Bighead Carp and Silver Carp that now infest the Missouri River. They were originally grown in fish farms on that river, but some escaped, multiplied, and are now eating the food native fish species relied on. The Brown Tree Snake was accidentally brought to Guam in the 1940s, and found the local birds, rodents, and other small animals native to that place much to their liking. Nine of the eleven bird species on Guam prior to WWII are now extinct there.

“Many invasive species destroy habitat, the places where other plants and animals naturally live. Nutria are large rodents native to South America. Ranchers brought them to North America in the 1900s, hoping to raise them for their fur. Some nutria were released into the wild when the ranchers failed. Today, they are a major pest in the Gulf Coast and Chesapeake Bay regions of the United States. Nutria eat tall grasses and rushes. These plants are vital to the regions' marshy wetlands. They provide food, nesting sites, and shelter for many organisms. They also help secure sediment and soil, preventing the erosion of land. Nutria destroy the area’s food web and habitat by consuming the wetland grasses.” [source]

In the plant world, exotic species can dominate exiting ecosystems. Examples include:

Kudzu, which crowds out native plants by overwhelming and burying them. It was originally introduced as an ornamental ground cover capable of providing erosion control.
Purple Loosestrife, which invades wetlands forming dense root mats that choke out native plants and degrade wildlife habitats. It came to North America as seeds imbedded in soil used for ballasting ships, and led the USA and Canada to bring in another invasive species, two European beetles, who like to feed on it. The Colorado Department of Agriculture is fighting it vigorously.
Other common examples of invasive planets include Oriental Bittersweets, Chinese Wisteria, English Ivy, Sweet Autumn Clematis, Bugleweed (Ajuga), Barberry, Burning Bush, Lantana, Common Privet, Norway Maple Trees, Japanese Knotweed, Tansy, and Japanese Honeysuckle.

Misguided Ignorance

In the mid 1800’s, the prevailing view of Nature as something to be conquered was in vogue. For example, French naturalist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, whose 1849 who wrote a treatise entitled, ”Acclimatation et domestication des animaux utiles ("Acclimatization and Domestication of Useful Animals") in which he urged the French government to introduce foreign animals both to provide meat and to control pests. Wildlife scientist John Marzluff noted that the motives of the 19th-century acclimatization enthusiasts were largely cultural: "Western European settlers introduced many species throughout the world because they wanted birds from their homelands in their new environs.”

Similar views prevailed in the United States, particularly around New York’s Central Park. IN 1864, Park commissioners experimented with the introduction of exotic bird species, to mixed “success.”

The American Acclimatization Society was one such group, founded in New York City in 1871 dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna into North America for both economic and cultural reasons. The group's charter explained its goal was to introduce "such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as may be useful or interesting."

That was bad enough, but in 1877 the chairman of the AAS was Eugene Schieffelin, who not only was a big believer in the AAS mission, he was also inordinately fond of the works of William Shakespeare. The Bard was an ardent bird lover, too, and mentioned well over 60 specific species often in his works. Ol’ Eugene took it as his life’s mission, and therefore the AAS’s mission, to introduce all of them into Central Park.

This they did. Some birds flourished, others failed to thrive, and some did OK but did not cause major damage to native flora and fauna. And then there was the European starling. They are nasty, aggressive birds, and they bred like made. And the spread, too, like mad, covering much of the Eastern Seaboard states within a few years. They particularly like to live/travel in large flocks; some have been estimated at a million birds or more.

Personal note: I recall that, around 1960 or so, a huge flock of sparrows invested my home town. I remember how extremely loud their collective calls were, and how much their droppings were like a thunderstorm’s downpour. One of my uncles even resorted to pulling out a .410 shotgun, loaded with bird shot, and firing vertically into the trees in his yard. What goes up must come down, but the falling pellets were completely lost in the poop torrent. After a few blasts, the birds left, and the cops came. When the situation was explained, they left and said “Carry on!”

Huge starling flocks caused a lot of damage on farms, forests, and everywhere they went. And then they went to Boston. There’s one more bird strike story I need to share at this point in the narrative.

Eastern Airlines Flight 375

Boston’s Logan Airport and its immediate surroundings were much loved by the invading starlings. In September, 1959, one commercial flight take-off had a runway abort because the speeding plane hit a huge flock of starlings. The pilots reported the noise was like machine-gun fire, and that their windscreen was so plastered by ex-starlings that they could not see out of the cockpit at all. But worse things would come.

Eastern Airlines Flight 375 was scheduled to fly from Logan to Philadelphia on the late afternoon of October 4, 1961. Mere seconds after the wheels left the tarmac, the Lockheed L-188A Electra plowed into a large flock of starlings. It was too late for a runway abort.

The Electra was powered by four piston engines driving propellors. The windscreen was no doubt covered by just-dead birds, and worse, multiple bird strikes completely disabled Engine 1 (port outboard) and caused a brief but severe reduction of thrust from Engines 2 (port inboard) and 4 (starboard outboard). The take-off was at a critical juncture, the loss of thrust on three engines while the fourth was at full power caused the aircraft to lose what little altitude it had and to roll strongly to the left. It knifed sideways into the shallow waters of Boston Harbor, broke in two, and sank into the mud. More than seventy-five ex-starlings littered the runway.

All but 10 of the 72 souls on board were killed.

There is no doubt that the crash was caused by invasive starlings. But there were some other factors that made the accident more severe than it should have been.

Because the plane pieces were in shallow water, recovery and examination was relatively easy. Investigators found that many of the fatalities were caused by post-crash drowning, not the impact of the crash directly. Many of the mounting between the seats and the cabin floor failed, the seat moved around, and many of the passengers drowned still wearing their seatbelts in a pile of chairs.

The bulk of the bird strikes were on the port side of the aircraft. There was some post-crash evidence that the pilot (on that side) was blinded and shocked by the impacts; the co-pilot position was less damaged. However, his seat mount had also failed, and it wasn’t clear when that happened in the crash sequence. One possibility was that he tromped hard on the rudder pedal to counteract the plane’s turn to the left, and it was the force of him doing so that caused his seat to fail and slide backward. If his hand remained on the control yoke, he would have pulled it back with him, causing the nose of the airplane to rise (as noticed by witnesses) and accelerating the stall to the water.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike#cite_note-thorpe-4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_375

https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/33647

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/10/05/bird-strike-boston-plane-crash

https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/wildlife/arp-Wildlife-Strike-Report-1990-2025.pdf

https://www.airportbiologist.com/post/unexpected-wildlife-strikes-beyond-birds-in-aviation

https://tc.canada.ca/en/aviation/publications/sharing-skies-guide-management-wildlife-hazards-tp-13549/chapter-1-wildlife-strike-costs-legal-liability

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/invasive-species

https://www.britannica.com/science/invasive-species

https://www.thespruce.com/worst-invasive-plants-2132422

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/invasive-species

https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Threats-to-Wildlife/Invasive-Species

https://ag.colorado.gov/conservation/noxious-weeds/colorado-noxious-weed-list/purple-loosestrife

https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/invasive-species

https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/333705

https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/333705ttps://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28681377