Obviously I am watching the news right now, and I do not want to talk about motivations or seeming coincidences with the new crash.
What I do want to discuss is this --> Could a commercial jet be downed by a large bird.
Ex: Canadian Geese Migrating south…A 12 kilo large goose may do some damage, but a 2 kilo gull probably wouldn’t do much. Is this assertion correct?
I am hearing more and more that JFK airport has a pretty significant problem with birds.
Maybe I just don’t see it. But how much damage could a bird have to a large airliner? Whats the straight dope?
It’s a grim reality of powered flight - birds get sucked into jet engines, sometimes causing them to lose power. They smash canopies, flaps and rudders. At the speeds jets travel, a collision with a 4-pound bird can do tremendous damage to a plane, LeBoeuf said.
From 1985 to 1999, there have been 39,854 recorded bird collisions with Air Force aircraft, according to statistics provided by the military. Most of the collisions take place at low altitudes, many of them near airfields. The collisions have done more than half a billion dollars in damage. Sixteen planes have been lost, and 36 people have been killed. Twenty-four died in a single crash when a radar early warning aircraft ran into a flock of geese just after takeoff from its Alaska base.
This after a brief search… I’m sure they’re is more.
for a long list of aircraft emergencies caused by bird strikes. Sure, few of them were fatal, but it’s easy to see how they could have been. A bird can literally shred a jet engine, cause uncontained engine fires, and make shrapnel fly around ripping holes in other important airplane parts.
The 1995 E-3 crash killed all 24 occupants. The E-3 is a modified Boeing 707.
I saw a picture of a fighter pilot who lost the better part of his left shoulder due to a bird strike (the pilot lived).
Since then I have seen film of the military firing chickens from a cannon at planes to see how they behave. They have specifically designed fighter canopies to bend and give rather than shatter if a bird hits them.
I don’t know if it is an Urban Legend or not but supposedly the British asked the US for its chicken-cannon and methodologies to test some of their planes. After a few firings the British were astonished at the thorough destruction the chicken cannon was causing their planes and asked the US to review what they were doing since they were way off the charts compared to the damage Americans reported. After reviewing the British methodologies the Americans replied that they needed to thaw the chickens before firing them out of the cannon. Supposedly the tests went much better once the British did this.
there is a funny story about this i recall vaguely ,
A british Team were investigating FOD and bird impacts to cockpit windsheilds ,they loaded dead chicken into a pneumatic cannon and fired it at the windshield the chicken went straight thru the glass and thru the support they were using to hold it in place .Which horrified alot of the testers ,. When they reported this to the suppliers of the equipment and asked what sort of glass should be used the manufacturers suggested that they defrost the chicken before firing it.
Will you elaborate on this? I just looked up Copa 201, and the indicated cause of the crash was faulty wiring, not bird strike.
As others have indicated, aircraft strikes with large birds are of considerable concern. Before the U.S. Department of Defense left Panama, they financed a study that I carried out of hawk and vulture migrations near the air bases because they were worried about this problem.
I worked in flight test for a civil aircraft manufacturer for a few years. They do indeed use a “chicken cannon”, powered by compressed air. The company I worked for used frozen birds. NOT thawed. They did this for two reasons:
A frozen bird will be more damaging, so it makes for a more rigorous test.
Firing a thawed carcass at an aircraft creates an enormous mess, very difficult to clean up. Since the test program may require many shots over a period of weeks or months, it would basically become impossible to conduct tests after only a few days if thawed birds were used. Yuck.
Because bird strikes are a serious problem, manufacturers do their best to design for the eventuality. Modern aircraft and engines are better than ever at surviving bird strikes. Most bird strikes do not result in significant aircraft damage.
if I may quote from that site:
“The Wildlife refuge is nationally and internationally renowned as a prime birding spot where thousands of water, land and shorebirds stop during migration. More than 325 species have been recorded here during the last 25 years.”
You could say that JFK is slightly concerned about birdstrikes.
I’m all for wildlife refuges but am I the only one that this strikes as amazingly stupid?
Planes may be able to survive a bird strike here and there but during take-off and landing a plane is particularly vulnerable and, I would guess, far less resilient to sucking a bird through its engines. Having a bird habitat on most approaches to the airport (I assume the planes take-off and land across the water rather than over people’s houses) seems ludicrously stupid.
Regardless of the cause of this crash it would seem prudent to either move the airport or move the habitat (and I have no doubt which would happen first).
but not all:
From: http://guinnessworldrecords.com/
Which lists the highest recorded bird strike at 37,000 ft when a comercial airliner hit a vulture Nov. 29, 1973.
During take off/approach, the chances of a bird getting through the windshield are a lot lower since the aircraft is moving much slower.
More likely is the chance of an engine ingesting one. If this happened, it would not be a doomsday scenario as:
[li] The engine would still likely run, unless it was a large bird (although it would certainly suffer damage).[/li]
[li] Even if it did fail, pilots are religously tested and trained on their ability to pilot an aircraft with an engine faliure. So much so that they can still take-off if necessary after an engine fails (far more dangerous than if it fails when you’re already in the air).[/li]
In this particualy incident, early reports are that the port engine actually fell off along with a good portion of the wing. I cannot even imagine any birdstrike scenario accomplishing that on a large, modern commercial airliner.
B) Remove the birds (i.e. do something to Jamaica Bay that makes it uninviting to birds)
How you would do B I have no idea. The birds don’t seem to mind a nearby airport so I doubt scarecrows would be effective. More likely opening it up to developers would do the trick. They can crowd out wildlife in no time flat.
I agree…a commercial sized jet engine can probably eat a bird and not suffer too badly. Several birds could be a different story.
A plane at cruising altitude can survive the loss of an engine. I believe the FAA will only certify planes that fly over the ocean (as this one was to do) if they can still fly after losing 50% of their engines (note the monstrous engines on a 777 so just one engine can still fly the entire plane).
Nevertheless takeoff is an entirely different matter. The loss of 50% of the plane’s power at takeoff I think is just too much to bear. Even if the plane could conceivably limp through such a thing the pilots have much less room to recover close to the ground than they do at high altitude. I think such an event is going ot be a disaster for any plane during takeoff (once airborne).
I agree. Regardless of the answer to whether a plane can takeoff losing an engine is moot when you lose a good portion of the wing to boot. I also agree that no birdstrike, especially at those ‘relatively’ low speeds is going to shear a wing or engine off.
The salt marshes of the bay aren’t suitable for building, which is why they are still there in the first place. In any case, there are tons of Canada Geese and other waterfowl throughout the bays and inlets of most of the NYC area. (I have birded the metro area for many years.) Canada geese also love golf courses. If you chase the birds out of Jamaica Bay (probably impossible given its size, at least without enormous expense) they would be fairly likely to end up in the Flushing Bay next to La Guardia Airport or the marshes near Newark. Besides that Jamaica Bay is a major migratory stopover, so simply killing or chasing away the birds that are there at any one time won’t help much - more will come in from all over eastern North America. And even if you got rid of the waterfowl you’d still have to deal with the gulls, which are even more difficult to deter.
Nope. Loss of an engine on takeoff and climb-out is one of the critical cases contributing to an aircraft’s design. As such, If power is lost on one engine, the aircraft must be able to continue, or at least to be able to circle and land again. I’m not saying that the sphincter-pucker-factor won’t be high in the cockpit, but it alone won’t “be a disaster for any plane during takeoff”.
I sense the question of bird strike requirements burning in everyone’s mind. And, I just read a related article and wanted to share.
From “Simulating Bird Strike Damage in Jet Engines” by Joe Metrisin and Brian Potter at Florida Turbine Technologies, which appeared in ANSYS Solutions magazine, Volume 3 Number 4, Fall 2001 issue:
Not entirely true. If the aircraft gets passed V[sup]1[/sup], the takeoff decision point, the aircraft can and will take off on one engine. This is on most jets “around” 145-155 kts. Rotation speed is also within a few knots (give/take) of this speed.
If they don’t take off when they pass V[sup]1[/sup] they risk running out of runway and plowing into god only knows what. A plane full of fuel is not a nice thing to crash into other things with.
I actually remember this exact thing happening about 2-3 years ago in Calgary. A Canadian Airlines 737 ingested a Goose and took out #2 engine while taking off. The pilot had no choice but to take off on one engine and land. Other than a slightly bumpier than normal landing, everyhthing was fine.
Let me also mention I am talking about 2 engine Jetliners (737, 757/767, 777, A300, 310, 320, etc…). A 3-4 Engine Jet can also take-off after loosing an engine, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on board a 747 if it only had 1 engine functioning.