Name: How a Bird Can Destroy a $100 Million Airplane
Uploaded: 2020-10-23T23:23:51.000Z
Duration: 7 min 33 s
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Humans have always been a little jealous of birds, at least to an extent.

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For thousands of years, we looked up at them and envied their ability to fly and wondered what the world might look like from up there.

Birds were beautiful, majestic creatures full of wisdom, and eventually we managed to build a machine capable of seeing the world as they saw it.

It was only afterwards, though, that we discovered birds are kind of dicks.

Even Orville Wright struggled with birds, hitting his plane in 1905 And in the 1911 air race between France and Madrid, a pilot found himself getting attacked mid air by an eagle, which he drove away by shooting at it with his pistol.

In 1912 the first recorded fatality of a bird strike on an airplane took place when a goal got stuck in the plane's controls, which caused the pilot to tragically crash decades later.

In 1960 Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Boston and flew through a flock of birds, which severely damaged all four of the plane's engines and caused it to crash into Boston Harbor, resulting in the loss of life of 62 people on board and representing the deadliest known incident ever caused by birds.

But it's not just the engines that birds are capable of causing damage to.

In 2004 a KLM flight departing from Amsterdam Skiffle suffered a bird strike to their nose landing gear during takeoff.

Since the landing gear ended up being retracted normally, they continued on to their destination at Barcelona, but upon landing the plane veered unexpectedly off the runway and crashed.

The cause was later determined to be a cut cable in the nose wheel steering system caused by that bird strike, and while everybody aboard the plane survived, the plane itself was destroyed and written off as a total loss.

But perhaps the most famous incident of a bird strike on an airplane was back in 2009 when US Airways Flight 15 49 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York and quickly ran into a flock of geese.

Many of which got stuck in the plane's engines, which caused a complete power failure.

Unable to reach any airport, the pilots thankfully managed to guide the plane into a ditch landing in the Hudson River and saved everybody on board.

But the results could have obviously been way worse.

And it's not just airplanes that birds hit either.

In 1999 Italian supermodel and pony lookalike Fabio got hit in the face by a bird that broke his nose while he was enjoying a roller coaster.

And in the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix, a driver for Lotus got hit in his face by a bird while going through a corner just too tight, which caused him to crash.

It's estimated that just in the United States alone, about 13,000 birds will strike an airplane every year and cause about $400 million in damages Worldwide.

It's believed that bird strikes cause about $1.2 billion of damage, more than the price of two brand new Airbus A 3 88 hundreds.

Most bird strikes on airplanes occur during takeoff or landing at lower altitudes, where birds are more common to be.

That's not to say that they only happen here, though.

There was an instance a while back, where a pilot flying over Ivory Coast at 11,300 m unexpectedly crashed into a vulture, which also happens to be the highest recorded altitude of a bird ever measured.

Birds generally make impact on any part of the front facing part of a plane, so the windscreen, the nose wings and engines are the areas that are most often hit.

The engines, in particular, though, are the most vulnerable.

A bird getting ingested into one is dangerous because as the bird strikes, one of the blades of the fan inside, that blade could become displaced into another blade, which causes a cascading engine failure.

The fans inside of the engines air spinning at their high speed during takeoff, where the presence of birds air also most common and therefore makes for the most vulnerable period.

Flocks of birds provide firm or opportunities of one, causing a cascading engine failure, since multiple strikes are likely to occur.

But what can be done to mitigate this from happening?

Airports around the world employed various techniques to keep birds away, including making food hard to access, keeping birds of prey or guard dogs present as a visual deterrent.

Using fake effigies of predators and speaker systems playing predator noises using cannons and pyrotechnics to make loud, scary noises.

Placing sharp spikes on areas where birds may perch up on to deny them anywhere convenient tow land or by bringing in sharp shooters with rifles or shotguns to keep their populations in check.

JFK Airport in New York used to experience a problem with the nearby colony of goals flying overhead.

There was contributing up to 315 bird strikes on airplanes there per year.

So they brought in snipers to begin shooting the birds as they flew over in 1991 hoping that it would encourage them to change their flight path toe somewhere else.

Within two years, they had shot down over 28,000 of those goals, which was about half of the population of the colony, and bird strikes on planes were reduced by 89%.

A more humane method of avoiding bird strikes, though, has been the recent development of avian radar, which is surprisingly powerful.

The Dutch military, for example, has developed a system that they call radar observation of bird intensity, where Robin for short robin is capable of tracking thousands of birds simultaneously in real time, day and night.

With 360 degree coverage out to a range of 10 kilometers, updating every single birds position speed heading and size every 2 to 3 seconds.

Deployment of Robin by the Royal Netherlands Air Force at air bases has been proven to reduce bird strikes by 50% as air traffic controllers air able to better alert pilots to flock of birds nearby during takeoff and landing procedures.

Still, the impacts of birds on planes, when they do hit, can be pretty devastating.

The force of an impact depends greatly on the weight of the bird, the speed difference between it and the plane, and the direction of the impact.

The energy of the impact increases with the square of the speed difference, which is why a low speed impact of a small bird on a car windshield causes very little damage.

While a high speed impact with a jet can cause catastrophic damage, learning how and why airplanes or cars work is interesting, and while I'm not really qualified to tell you any of that, there are courses over a brilliant that are, and you can get started learning there right now for free at Brilliant or slash R L L.

They, of course, have excellently designed courses on everything from classical mechanics and algebra two, A future upcoming course on automotive engineering.

They don't teach through basic memorization, either.

They teach through, teaching you the principles behind a concept and guiding you to understand how to use those principles and context.

A brilliant addition to Brilliant is that you can now download their courses offline on their mobile app so that you can learn no matter where you are or what you're doing.

It's a great way to fill in those small moments or commutes that you might have in your life.

 You can start learning for free at brilliant dot org's slash R l l. 

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How a Bird Can Destroy a $100 Million Airplane

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