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Birds In Plane Engines Nothing New, Difficult to Prevent
By
John Del Signore
Published Jan 16, 2009
Modified Jan 16, 2009
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By
John Del Signore
Published Jan 16, 2009
Modified Jan 16, 2009
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Birds—they think they own the skies. Ever since the Wright Brothers they've been vying for supremacy up there, landing their first fatal blow in 1912 by downing a plane into the surf off Long Beach, California. Yesterday's emergency landing in the Hudson River was just the latest chapter in an ongoing pitched battle between bird and plane. Of course, from the point of view of the Canada geese believed to have been consumed by both engines of U.S. Airways Airbus A320, yesterday's strike must have seemed a bit of a Pyrrhic victory (though there's probably a sweet flock of virgin geese greeting them in the afterlife, hey-oh).
Mary Cummings, an aviation professor at MIT, tells the Daily News that bird strikes have become more of a problem the last few years. Nearly 500 planes have been damaged by collisions with birds since 2000, the FAA says, causing an estimated $600 million a year in damage. According to the Times, the most recent incident took place at JKF in December 2006, when a great blue heron was swallowed by the engine of a Boeing 767 jet shortly after takeoff. (The plane returned to the airport with no injuries...besides the heron.)
At La Guardia, the last bird strike was in 2003, when an American Airlines Fokker (heh) 100 plane hit a flock of geese upon takeoff, causing the right engine to fail and diverting the flight to JFK. The News reports that Port Authority officials have been at odds with animal-rights activists for years over their efforts to thin the geese population on Rikers Island near La Guardia. (Activists want nonlethal methods for managing the population.) At JFK, they use falcons; here's a killer video.
Tagged
airport
bird
crash
engine
geese
hudson river
JFK
La Guardia
new york
nyc
plane
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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