When it’s bird vs. airplane, both lose

Depending on your perspective, John Hamilton is a lucky pilot or an unlucky one.

A recreational pilot for 13 years, Hamilton has twice been flying his personal aircraft when birds have crashed into it.

The first time, after he had accumulated three to four years of flying time, a small sparrow hit his Piper Arrow single-piston-engine airplane’s windshield as he was on final approach for landing at a Maryland airport.

The sparrow didn’t breach the windshield, but “it scared the ever-living Jesus out of me,” said Hamilton, vice president of information technology for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association who has logged 1,000 flight hours.

And last month, Hamilton was descending from 9,000 feet at night in his Mooney Ovation when he and his co-pilot “just heard a very big thunk.”

“Both of us thought we’d dropped something in the cockpit,” he said.

It wasn’t until after they landed and were pushing the airplane into a hangar that Hamilton noticed a quarter-sized dimple on the leading edge of the Mooney’s wing – and “remnants of a fairly large bird” on the wing and elevator.

“It was definitely bigger than a sparrow.”

There were nearly 330 bird strike incidents at Wichita Eisenhower National Airport between March 1, 1990, and Feb. 18, 2016, according to an Eagle analysis of Federal Aviation Administration data.

About 5 percent of the bird strikes reported at Eisenhower led to minor or substantial damage, according to the data, which relies on voluntary reports by either airlines, aircraft owners, air traffic control or the airport.

Collisions between airplanes and birds can be a serious event. According to the Bird Strike Committee USA, more than 255 people have been killed worldwide from bird strikes since 1988. And between 1990 and 2013, collisions between aircraft and birds and other wildlife cost civil aviation in the U.S. more than $900 million a year, according to the voluntary committee made up of officials from the federal government, airlines and airports.

Perhaps the most widely known aviation bird strike occurred on Jan. 15, 2009, when a U.S. Airways Airbus A320 piloted by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger encountered a flock of large birds two minutes after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The birds were ingested by the plane’s engines, resulting in a nearly complete loss of power, and the plane was ditched in the Hudson River. All 150 passengers and five crew members survived.

Of the known aircraft types involved in Eisenhower airport bird strikes, the Bombardier CRJ100/200 regional jet was the most common, followed by the Fokker F100 regional jet and the Airbus A319 narrowbody jetliner.

Here is a searchable database from the FAA of recorded wildlife strikes at Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, Jabara Airport and McConnell Air Force base.

Data shows the majority of the wildlife strikes in Wichita are small birds. But in many cases, the species of the bird involved is not reported, perhaps because there is not much left to identify. Meadowlarks, the state bird, were the most common recorded species involved in bird strikes at Eisenhower. Other common bird species are the mourning dove and killdeer.

Birds aren’t the only wildlife hit by planes: Two skunks, two opossums and one coyote were hit on Eisenhower’s runways.

Since March 1990, there has been $100,430 in damage caused by bird strikes at Eisenhower.

The most damage was caused in August 2015, when an unknown bird hit a Bombardier Challenger 300 business jet owned and operated by Cargill as it descended at night to Eisenhower. FAA data says that incident caused about $40,000 in damage – “feathers and small dent on top of A/C Radome. Replaced Radome.”

And in May 1995, a group of gulls caused “substantial damage” to a U.S. Airways Beechcraft 1900 turboprop airliner going 102 mph at takeoff from Eisenhower. The aircraft was grounded for repair because of damage to the outboard wing.

Managing the birds

Brad Christopher, assistant director of airports for the Wichita Airport Authority, said the FAA requires commercial airports such as Eisenhower to have a Wildlife Hazard Management Plan. The plan outlines ways in which an airport will try to prevent birds and other wildlife from interfering with aircraft.

At Eisenhower, that includes mowing grass around the airfield to a certain height, ensuring there are no seed plants or crops growing near the airfield and prohibiting haying operations on its property, said Ty Richardson, airport operations manager.

The plan is updated annually, he said, with the help of a wildlife biologist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Richardson said the airport has contracted with the Agriculture Department for 16 years for the biologist, who also monitors wildlife at Eisenhower as well as collects and analyzes data.

Richardson said airport operations staff – who are on duty seven days a week, 21 hours a day – also monitor the airfield for times when birds or other wildlife pose an immediate hazard to aircraft.

In those instances, they have “special, little pyrotechnics guns” that make a loud bang or screeching noise – “think Fourth of July fireworks,” he said – to scare wildlife off the property. Sometimes the horn of an airport vehicle works, too.

When those measures don’t work, nuisance birds can be killed through a depredation permit issued to the authority by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he said.

“We try our hardest to scare them away before we get to the last step,” Richardson said.

The reality is there’s only so much an airport can do to create an environment that’s unattractive to birds, said Christopher, the airport authority official.

“Airports can do the best job in the world managing wildlife on their airports,” he said. “But you’ve still got a miles and miles of airspace around the airport. … It’s hard to reach out that far to manage these things.”

Hamilton, the pilot, said even with the best wildlife mitigation, there are going to be critters, winged or four-legged, that will thwart those measures.

At least that’s been his experience with his home airport in Frederick, Md.

“It’s not foreign to this airport,” Hamilton said. “We’ve got either deer on the runway or birds in the air.

“Bird strikes can happen. When it does happen, you just remember your training and fly the airplane.”

This story was originally published December 26, 2016 at 12:01 PM with the headline "When it’s bird vs. airplane, both lose."