CALCUTTA: A little bundle of flesh, feathers, and bones, weighing as little as half’ a kilogram, can spell disaster for a huge jumbo jet weighing 325,000 kg, if the two come in contact with each other.
Birds, innocuous, harmless creatures, become killers when they strike an aircraft in air, posing a grim danger to the lives of airborne travelers and causing extensive damage to the machine.
Birds became potential hazards with the switching over from piston-engine aircraft to turbine engine ones. Turbine engines cause birds to be sucked out of the sky with the increase in frontal area and the tremendous suction of air into the turbines.
However, bird hits are much older phenomena and aviation history records the first bird hit in 1912, when Carl Rogers, the first man to fly coast to coast in the United States, was killed and his aircraft destroyed. In India between 1980 and 1982, six lives and 12 defense aircraft were lost due to bird strikes, according to available statistics. Plane and bird collisions may lead to costly repairs to the airframe and engines, says Gurcharan Batura, executive director, Corporate Planning and Management Services, International Airports Authority of India.
Before the introduction of jets, the environment of an airfield had little relevance to the bird eradication program, Birds sucked into jet engines or a bird hit on any other pan of a fast moving aircraft, Can not only cause serious damage to the body of an aircraft, but poses a serious danger to human lives.” Says Batura.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 15, 1994
