A Perspective On Animals Vs. Aircraft

A few years ago I walked the entire assembly line of a new type of Airbus at its sprawling plant in southern France. When I stepped outdoors for a look at the final product, I was both surprised and disappointed.
The new European-made jetliner was standing there, all right, but it was covered with slime and blood. Not a very auspicious start for a new plane, I thought aloud.
"It's OK," my Swedish (!) guide assured me. "Every new aircraft type has to be tested for bird strikes before it's licensed," he explained. Sure enough, a real cannon was firing real frozen birds at jetliner speeds at the plane's engines, cockpit windows and sensitive front edges of its wings. All the aircraft parts held.
In a bird strike, an aircraft with damaged turbines or twisted fan blades doesn't have enough altitude or speed to restart the engines, or for the pilot to read emergency checklists and fiddle with the instruments. In the meantime, the powerless plane flies like a glider. Incredibly, the New York captain had long glider experience from his earlier Air Force days.
Bird strikes don't bring down an aircraft very often, fortunately. It's just as well, for obvious reasons, landings on water aren't practiced much, either. If they aren't done in calm water, wheels up, tail first or near a shoreline for quick rescue, a plane can catch a wave and cartwheel with fatal results.
Whatever the ultimate cause may be in the icy Hudson River miracle, an emergency landing on water is just as hard as bouncing down on a runway. Passengers surviving an accidental splashdown in New York 25 years ago said they weren't sure if they landed in the water or if they had just felt an extra-hard landing on a runway.
An airplane's acquaintance with a bird is not really all that new. My Airbus assembly plant tour started at its so-called "iron bird." Every plane maker keeps at least one. An "iron bird" is the stripped-down skeleton of a jetliner with hundreds of miles of electric cables and hydraulic lines and pumps still in place.
Hardly a showcase, an "iron bird" simplifies an aircraft mechanic's access to "live" copies of all the wires and controls to be checked out before any installation work is performed on the real deal. It's sort of a full-scale airplane blueprint with sharper edges.
Any experienced captain routinely looks out the cockpit windows to note, mentally, places for a possible safe emergency landing. Once the New York captain ruled out a nearby airport about five minutes flying time away, he opted for the wide-open Hudson River rather than a tree-filled Central Park.
Some 20 years ago, when the two engines failed on an MD-80 simultaneously, the airplane made a safe landing in a snowy farmyard north of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The "host" farmer compared it to having 100 uninvited guests literally dropping in for morning coffee.
The MD-80 had been deiced twice before takeoff, but fresh ice had formed anyway, breaking off and stalling both engines. Fortunately, the captain had flown the route many times and had always been staking out safe emergency alternatives, if he ever needed them.
The captain resigned from the airline soon after his farmyard miracle and toured his native Denmark as a highly-paid lecturer in crisis management. He later ran as a conservative for the nation's parliament and won a seat by a wide margin.
It may take several months before accident investigators release their conclusions. But they will have had the luxury of interviewing crew, passengers and witnesses and well as reading the flight records in those renowned "black" boxes (which are actually orange) that are already being downloaded in Washington.
At this moment, though, Canada seems to be taking most of the blame for what happened on the Hudson. Canada geese are suspected of slamming into the New York jetliner shortly after takeoff.
Canada is also blamed for our weather, the metric system, and even for funny money, which is suddenly stronger than the U.S. dollar, encouraging more snowbirds than usual to jam up Florida traffic this winter.
Even though all the passengers are currently elated they're still alive, a barrage of law suits will ultimately be filed against the airline, the heroic pilots, the plane and engine makers plus New York's LaGuardia airport authorities that sent the doomed Airbus off on its last flight.
Jetliners can't carry screens to shield their engines from bird strikes; they'd be too heavy and possibly be sucked into the power plants. Birds are no longer frightened off by loud runway noises or mating calls. Besides, birds aren't the only wilderness threat to an aircraft taking off or landing.
You can also find traces of bats, coyotes and (here in Florida) alligators ground up in an engine fan blade.
My former company operates about half its 800 daily flights above the Arctic Circle where the major wildlife threats are reindeer running out on the runway at precisely the wrong time.
We found that a few trained dogs, accompanied by a local farmer shouldering a shotgun (loaded with blanks) are an effective deterrent, at least for reindeer.