Factors that can Increase the Presence of Birds

Habitat features

Trees, shrubs, and grass provide food and roosting sites, making them prime attractants. Water is important, too.

Airports in coastal locations often have a much higher level of bird activity than inland airports. But even water pooling on uneven pavements can be enough to attract birds.

Bird migration paths

Migrating birds often follow well-defined flight paths in considerable numbers. If they intersect with your aerodrome, you’ll see seasonal spikes in bird activity.

Agricultural activity

Nearby farms of all kinds attract birds, not just ones that focus on plant agriculture.

For example, one site we help protect, RAF Lossiemouth, is surrounded by pig farms. These were identified as key factors in their wildlife management.

Landfill and other waste disposal sites

These sites, if poorly managed, can provide rich pickings to large numbers of birds.

Impact

How much Damage can a Bird do to an Aircraft?

There are several factors that impact the damage a bird can cause to an aircraft and the forces involved in bird strikes are huge.

A 6.8kg goose impacting an aircraft doing 200kts exerts a force of 16 tonnes. Add just 50kts to the speed and the force is suddenly 26 tonnes. At 280kts, the force is just over 32 tonnes.

These are approximate figures, but the key takeaway is that likelihood of strengthening any engine or airframe to completely resist such a force is tiny indeed.

Birds can strike aircraft in different places, resulting in variable affects. Damage to an engine or propellor naturally impact speed. Damage to the canopy affects control, while damage to vital sensors like pitot tubes can throw off air speed readings or worse. Not all scenarios result in death or injury.

So, How Can You Avoid a Liability Claim?

Official Guidance

All airports are required to continuously evaluate bird hazards, and to decrease the risk to aircraft operations by adopting measures that minimise the likelihood of collisions between wildlife and aircraft. Official regulations place minimal requirements on airports.

Example of guidelines

• EC Regulation 139/2014 and associated (EASA) Acceptable Means of Compliance and Guidance Material

• PANS Aerodromes (Doc 9981)

• ICAO Airport Services Manuals (Doc 9137)

• International Birdstrike Committee (IBSC) Standards and the ACI’s WHM Handbook

• An Aviation Industry Guide to the Management of Wildlife Hazards, Canada, TP 13549 - Sharing the Skies

But many authorities offer optional guidance for those who wish to exercise greater safety. With so much guidance available, airports deploy a variety of strategies to detect and mitigate bird strikes. To help you out, here’s our expert view...

Robin Radar’s Take on Bird Strike Guidance

Essentially, airports need to do two things:

1. Reduce the presence of birds in and around the airport as much as possible

2. Control bird populations to minimise the likelihood of collisions between birds and aircraft

Airports with a low risk profile only need to meet the minimum level of compliance. Larger airports with a higher risk profile should follow the extensive guidelines provided by ICAO, ACI, AESA and the FAA.

Airport Bird Control Solutions

Mobile Viewer

Mobile Viewer is designed for day-to-day operations. It empowers bird controllers and wildlife hazard management to access real-time information easily on tablets that can also be installed and used in vehicles. Mobile Viewer also uses the tablet’s GPS to pinpoint an operator’s current location in relation to the activity around them.

Mobile Viewer gives airports full situational awareness by sharing real-time data with a centralised office and the people on the ground.

Turn observations into data

The intuitive interface enables users to manually link species to specific tracks or locations based on human observation, for later reference and/or reporting. You can also add ground observations to quickly store information not related to tracks.

Capturing data from many sources and pulling it into a single view is critical for achieving the level of data-led forecasting that can future-proof sites. In the long term, airports can share data to build a much clearer picture of how birds interact with civil aviation around the world.

Customisable alerts & classifications

MAX immediately notifies on-site teams of activity detected in areas of risk, giving precious time to react and mitigate a potential bird strike.

Runway funnel and graph colours change, giving a visual cue when the number of birds is higher than your chosen threshold. These critical zones are pre-defined with support from our experts and are easy to modify based on new insights or site requirements.

You can customise all classifications to give you the information you need, from bird sizes to the number of birds in flocks. It’s also possible to classify non-avian threats, such as drones. When integrated with supporting solutions and countermeasures, you can detect and mitigate any encounter.

Early warnings and organised data

We built MAX to monitor birds from the start. Its antennas are designed explicitly with avian targets in mind. Height information is provided for all tracks, and there’s practically no cone of silence above the radar. Our flagship bird radar offers full 3D coverage from the horizon, up to at least 1km above ground level, covering the critical cycles and low-altitude activity that is most common at airports.

Sounds powerful, right? Let’s see it in action...

Solutions for Schiphol

We have a very large airport. If a bird controller was standing on the east side of the airport, then he couldn’t see what was happening on the north side. There’s only so much you can see with binoculars.

Ton Mens

Wildlife Hazard Manager

Schiphol Airport uses Robin Radar Systems to provide full bird monitoring coverage of all six of its runways. Full coverage is achieved with four 3D Flex radars.

The first radar was installed at Schiphol’s Polderbaan Runway in 2013. After almost three years of comprehensive trials and evaluation of our bird radar’s performance, the system was extended to include an additional three 3D Flex radars.

Schiphol Airport uses its radars to obtain actionable information on bird movements within 10km of its airport.

The real-time monitoring of high-risk birds, such as geese, is particularly useful in reducing the risk of bird strikes. But the long-term data gathering and analysis are also proving useful as input for habitat management and generating KPIs related to reducing the risk of bird strikes.

We can now give better answers to the questions we get asked. For example, ‘why are there X many bird strikes?’ Now we can say because there are more birds. It’s been a good Spring, good Summer, good breeding season, more bird migration, etc. And now we can show that with data. And because we can see where the birds are, at what time of the day, and the time of year – building up historical data – we can make better solutions to use our runways.

Ton Mens

Wildlife Hazard Manager

Mitigation Solutions for Civil Aviation

Habitat Management

Habitat management will vary depending on the location of your airport. But generally, this involves adapting the area around the airport to be less attractive to resident birds.

This can include reducing the number of trees, shrubs and other plants that provide food, shelter, or roosting sites. Even the height of grass can have an impact on bird activity.

To tackle wet grassland and areas of standing water, wildlife management teams must monitor weather patterns and develop processes to prevent transient formation of wetlands after heavy rainfall.

Community Engagement

Wildlife Management teams should liaise with local authorities to ensure that landfill waste sites and similar bird-attracting facilities are located far enough away from the airport. Similarly, airports should reach out to local farmers and work with them to limit the attraction of birds to fields.

Acoustic Deterrents

Acoustic deterrents use loud noises to scare and deter birds from entering your aerodrome. These can be pistols firing blank rounds, and most typically, propane cannons.

See how Berlin Airport uses our Mobile Viewer to remotely control Purivox propane cannons.

Another form of acoustic deterrent is Bio-Acoustics. It allows Bird Controllers to broadcast a natural bird call to deter birds.

Typically, the call is a distress call that the birds recognise, but may also be the hunting call of birds of prey known to hunt the birds in question.

Different species of birds react in different ways when they hear a distress call. Bird Controllers need to understand how a species will react to ensure that they don’t inadvertently direct them into a more dangerous position, or even attract them.

Bio-acoustics are only effective if you know the species and direction of the oncoming birds.

Ballistics

There are a variety of ballistic “countermeasures” to bird activity, but one of the most common is CAPA cartridges. Bird Controllers fire these cartridges to frighten high-flying birds in an aerodrome using a 4-calibre signal launcher (a flare gun). The four primary components that make up the cartridge are:

1. Primer
2. Ignition propellant composition
3. Delay composition
4. Sound composition

When engaged, the primer ignites the propellant, quietly boosting the entire cartridge to nearly 1,000ft AGL within seven seconds. Then, a small secondary charge detonates the sound composition, creating a 150dB bang.

These cartridges are inherently dangerous and expensive, requiring training, certification, and permission to use.

Lasers

A combination of optics, filtering, and light frequencies creates a laser that deters birds. Due to their visual abilities and instincts, birds perceive a laser beam as a physical object, which they will naturally avoid. It’s safe, silent, and considered impossible for birds to get used to, so they’re unlikely to adapt to fly straight through them.

This is a silent and less disruptive way to deter birds. Laser systems are available as automated systems and portable tools for Bird Controllers to deploy when needed.

But even a low-powered laser can cause temporary or permanent blindness to humans. If the beam blinds a driver or pilot, this could cause a serious incident resulting in loss of life.

Integrating Detection & Mitigation Solutions

It’s more than likely that the best bird detection solution for you is going to be a mix of the above technologies.

But which mix, exactly?

That’s going to be dependent on your circumstances. We work with world-class integrators who integrate our radars into modular mitigation systems, so you don’t have to. This solves the headache of dealing with multiple vendors and means you don’t need to integrate technology and processes together.

About Robin Radar Systems

Specialised in radar detection of birds and drones; our bird radar monitoring subscription provides you with actionable data of bird activity on and around your airport, allowing you to take control of your bird hazard issue, with a low-cost monthly fee instead of a large capital expenditure.

With the provided KPIs related to real-time, 24/7 monitoring of bird activity, such as runway crossings and bird presence in and around take-off and landing areas, you can reduce the risk of bird-hazard-related safety incidents.

Long-term monitoring KPIs, like near-misses, bird activity hotspots, and bird activity responses to long-term habitat management measures, provide the actionable information you need to justify which measures should be implemented, and to prove their effectiveness afterwards.

After experiencing the value our radars create for bird hazard management teams, many of our customers have installed additional radars to increase coverage, and some have even used the data they provide to successfully defend against claims of liability for bird strike damage from airlines.

Our radars can also be found on military air bases and wind farms, providing 24/7 bird detection to those most at risk. To detect modern hazards, our drone detection radars can be deployed to reduce disruption and improve security.