World: Where birds and planes collide, a winged robot may help

The bird, apparently a female falcon, wheels into view 100 feet over Edmonton International Airport, flapping her wings — hunting behaviour. She pursues a flock of starlings, which scatter into the safety of the woods. The falcon is majestic, graceful and resolute. She is also a machine — a battery, sensors, GPS, barometer and flight control computer stuffed into a falcon-shaped, hand-painted exterior. A human on the ground controls her wings. The Robird patrols the skies around the airport, in Alberta, Canada. Her mission is to mimic falcon behavior in order to head off a serious threat to aviation: the bird strike, which happens when a bird or flock collides with an airplane. The Robird doesn’t actually catch any prey. Its job is to alert birds to the presence of a predator, herd them away from the airport, and teach them to prefer a less dangerous neighbourhood. Small birds do little damage to a plane, even if they are sucked into an engine (“ingested” is the aviation term). But a large bird, or sometimes a flock of small ones, can bend or break engine blades. In the worst case, big birds knock out two engines, leaving zero. As the world knows, a flock of Canada geese disabled both engines of a US Airways jet in January 2009. According to the FAA, US civil aircraft suffered 142,000 bird strikes between 1990 and 2013. Gerald Skocdople, chief pilot for the 737 at Canadian North Airlines, said that bird strikes vary with routes and time of year — “in Canada in the middle of the winter it’s not too big of an issue.” He estimated that at Canadian North, about one flight in a thousand strikes a bird. Story has more details.<br/>