FAA data show bird strikes are bad and getting worse - really?

WIRED: Large airports use everything from flares and falconry to clearing habitat to keep birds away from runways.

“Clearly the mood here is we’re doing a pretty good job of dealing with birds on the airports,” he said. “The problem is those strikes that occur away from the airport.”

SHOOT: I'm not sure I agree with the data, or the way it is phrased/presented. I'll tell you why. My gut says it's unlikely that bird populations suddenly swelled, given that human populations are doing that, and depriving pretty much every other species of a habitat. More likely, I'm guessing, is that there are simply more airplanes flying and more often. Note that the graph below doesn't show bird strikes in 2008, a year in which the number of flights [and this incidents] almost certainly declined. But hopefully they can use radar to solve this problem.

clipped from www.wired.com The Federal Aviation Administration released the data online, detailing more than 89,000 incidents since 1990. The data shows the number of strikes per 10,000 flights tripled from 0.527 to 1.751 between 1990 and 2007, the last full year in the database. “Significant strikes are still a very small part of the total bird strike numbers,” Brown told USA Today. clipped from www.wired.com The number of collisions between birds and aircraft has rapidly increased over the last two decades, despite better technology to combat them. clipped from www.wired.com Although aircraft have long had to contend with hitting birds, the issue received national attention after U.S. Airways flight 1549 lost both engines and landed in the Hudson because it ingested some Canada geese. Searing has worked on the bird strike problem for more than 20 years and is the president of Airport Wildlife Management International.