Bird Control

https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/entering-the-wild-kingdom/

https://www.newswire.com/news/the-bird-guard-protects-aircraft-jet-engines-from-the-potential

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2011046580A2

https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-airplane-manufacturers-put-a-grating-in-the-front-of-jet-engines-to-prevent-bird-ingestion

An Eagle primarily feeds on fish. You need a species that preys on birds. A Goshawk or a Prairie Falcon would likely be more intimidating to a bird.

Ha ha that might be so, but a grizzly bear eats mostly nuts and berries, and that doesn't ease the fear factor when you are face to face with one....

That is because you are a nut if you try to face one down,so he will eat you.

A woman escaped being eaten by a grizzly with just a .22 pistol

When asked how she did it,she said it took about 5 rounds into to her husband's knees before he went down and that gave her time to escape.

A few weeks ago I saw a large flock of Canada geese divert to the opposite side of the river valley when they saw a bald eagle flying low over the river. They weren't about to take a chance.

I had free ranging chickens,and one day when my kids were flying a kite with an eagle print on it, all of the chickens panicked and went inside the coop and stayed all day.

Maybe they should put durable helium balloons with hawks or eagles on them around the airport perimeter. They would move with the wind to create the illusion of live birds of prey.(Do not use Mylar,as it may create a lot of radar clutter).

..."Fall migration is the most dangerous time to fly.

FAA data also shows that 52 percent of all bird strikes occur from July to October, right after breeding season when populations are at their peak and when birds are heading south for the winter. There are also droves of immature birds taking to the skies at that time; their inexperience might keep them from getting out of harm’s way.

Most strikes occur closer to the ground.

More than 70 percent of collisions between commercial aircraft and birds take place less than 500 feet above the ground, and more than 90 percent take place less than 3,500 feet above the ground. Those numbers are even higher for non-commercial aircraft. The record height for a bird strike in the United States is 31,300 feet.

The collisions do occasionally kill people, too.

Very few bird strikes actually damage airplanes, but the ones that do can be calamitous—especially when birds get sucked into the engines. The FAA says that wildlife strikes have killed more than 255 people worldwide, and have destroyed more than 240 aircraft since 1988. They also cost the U.S. aviation industry up to $937 million annually.

The good news is that there are tons of solutions.

Preventing bird strikes is often as simple as blocking off ponds and any other areas around the tarmac where avians might like to feed or perch. Growing tall grass might also turn away certain species, like Canada Geese. Once birds become a fixture, scare tactics come into play: Gas cannons, pyrotechnics, falconers, and even paintball guns are some of the most creative options. For rarer birds like Snowy Owls, live capture and relocation is the preferred method. But arguably the most promising answer to this problem is avian radar, which can detect flying birds and let air traffic control know when a plane needs to be grounded, just like in stormy weather."...

https://www.audubon.org/news/everything-you-need-know-about-birds-and-planes

https://detect-inc.com/avian-bat-radar-systems/

It would take a lot to deflect a heavy bird traveling several hundred miles an hour with respect to the plane. Whatever was used to deflect this bird would be working into a several hundred mile-an-hour headwind and have a very limited amount of time when the target was within range.

Remember you can't add very much weight, or risk failure of the mechanism causing even more damage...I think bird deterrent schemes in the area, is a lot more practical....20 lbs at 250 mph = ~42,000 ft/lbs

..."Ascend provides a series of solutions all aimed at the reduction of bird strikes in aviation. Over the last five years, these solutions have been implemented in Aalborg Airport with amazing results – after implementing the avian radar, the number of strikes in 2018 dropped by 75%. The next step is to make the radar-measured bird risk forecasts available to airlines and pilots. This works like a weather forecast and enables pilots to mitigate the risk when the probability of a strike is high.

The nature of the aviation industry makes it uniquely vulnerable to a multitude of elements, ranging from airports operating their runways at 99% capacity to collisions between birds and aircraft. Bird strikes are an increasing problem for the aviation safety. US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) reported a 38% growth in bird strikes from 2009 to 2015 and has noted that bird strike incidents have shown an alarming trend of significant growth.1_"....

https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/bird-strike-prevention-reducing-collisions-birds-aircraft/15027/

I love that snorkel. A bird should have relative low mass and it is irregularly shaped. One would think it could be easily diverted with air or water. Maybe even sound.

But we accept certain death rates for all kinds of activity. A benefit/cost ratio. And it works, for most benefit and few pay the cost.

Like medicine. Without the pandemic, medical malpractice is the 3rd leading cause of death. ~ 500K every year. Everyone accepts and lives with this.

Does anyone know the velocity of these high pressure water cutters?

...."The speed of the waterjet cutting machine is closely related to the power of the pump, which is directly proportional to the power. Our common waterjet cutter will run between 40,000psi and 60,000psi (psi is the unit of pressure). At 40,000psi, water is ejected from the nozzle at a speed of approximately Mach 3 (760m/s). At 60,000psi the water will be ejected at over Mach 3 (1020m/s) to cut the material."....

Do you want to cut the bird to pieces, because I can't see that helping...not to mention the cost and weight of all those water jets involved....the water hitting the engine probably wouldn't be good either, the volume of water needed seems to me would be significant....

https://swaterjet.com/waterjet-cutting-speed

With a new application comes new configuration. What if there is just one nozzle.....that forms a circular aimed slit around the rim. A circular chamber can be recharged with the projectile media. A sliding ring valve could be actuated to fire the nozzle and then reset for next recharge. The ring wouldn't have to move much.

It was just something to kick around. With the increase in bird strikes and the advance in tech, probably a lot cheaper to detect with radar now, and just avoid them.

I do recall ETs in the service cranking the radar power up and trying to knock sea gulls out of the sky. All un-authorized of course. Hard on the equipment. But they can weld with rf transistors now.

Yes it would be great if there was some deterrent that could scare the birds from the path of the airplane, sort of like a deer whistle, but birds are unpredictable when startled and the range would need to be pretty long, and of course imperceptible to humans...plus there doesn't seem to be any EM wave that scares birds...pigeons and doves are the worse offenders, if we had a way to scare pigeons we'd probably have heard about it....

In some areas where pigeons have become a major nuisance (e. g. around grain processing facilities in urban areas), there has been considerable success in mitigation by bringing in nesting pairs of peregrine falcons.

The greatest risk for bird strikes is near airports, as would be expected with the relation behind risk and altitude. Perhaps having a falconer on hand to send out kestrels or peregrine falcons whenever birds are detected on flight paths would work. Another possibility is a drone that imitates birds of prey. The simplest might be a set of speakers that plays the "Hawk!" alarm call common to most non-raptor bird species; that sends them into the bushes very quickly.

Birds are bad but this is even worse...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2v1Pgpzp88

New word ...snarge...

There is no single solution to preventing bird strikes. I've been involved in a few and none of the ideas here would've prevented them.

The most notable for me was when I was a crew member on a NASA CH-53A research helicopter. We were climbing out of Wallops Island, Virginia heading north over the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

I was sitting on the jump seat between the pilots being a 3rd set of eyes looking out for other aircraft when I noticed a turkey buzzard ahead of us and probably 500 feet above us. I didn't think much about him but I let the pilots know about it. There was no concern from them either. The Eastern Shore is practically overrun with the darn things.

As we were almost under it I watched as it suddenly folded its wings and dove straight down, apparently in panic from our big helicopter. Somehow that sucker made it through the blades and impacted us square in the nose. It severely crumpled the radar access door and forced us to abandon our mission and return to Wallops to inspect the aircraft and repair the damage. Not to mention cleaning out a lot of feathers and blood.

I consider myself very very lucky. If he had hit about 3 feet higher he may well have taken out the center windshield section and me sitting right behind it. I really wish he had hit an engine. They had particle separators on the intakes and the bird would not have bothered them.

Perhaps in front of the air intake, each engine could carry a magnesium alloy mesh, that is made from sharp knife edged triangular section rods facing the possible bird hit, with clearance about 100 mm square . The sharp edges would cut the bird into sections of maximum 100 mm square, and possibly do lesser damage than when a whole bird enters the engine .

After this coarse mesh, there could even be a closer mesh , with similar knife edge rods .

An airport bird story.

I retired from a company in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that provided mission ready aircraft for a variety of uses around the world. Most of our aircraft, turboprop twins like King Airs and Bombardier DHC-8 were equipped and flown out of our air park in the Valley. We also had some small turbojet aircraft for support use.

Our runway ran northwest to southeast and the southeast end ended at a farm which alternated growing corn and soybeans every season. One spring the farmer decided to fertilize with a mixture of cow manure and ground up chicken parts discarded from the poultry processing plants in the area.

Within hours of the fertilizing it seems that every turkey buzzard within 50 miles was attracted to that field. We were used to that annual smell and thought nothing of it. That is, until our first aircraft departure. As the departing aircraft approached that end of the runway on its takeoff roll at least 50 birds lifted off from the field, apparently in fright. That resulted in a very close call.

We tried every which way under the sun to disperse those birds so we could resume normal flight operations. Buzzards are extremely stubborn birds and nothing kept them out of that field for more than a few minutes. We basically shut down the air park for 3 or 4 days until the birds were done and went away.

The solution?? The company bought the farm. The runway was eventually extended into it and additional facilities built on it.

Would have thought that anti-small-drone measures were as vitally important, particularly for military aircraft.

What are the particle separators mentioned re: helicopter intakes ?

A particle separator is a device mounted on the intake of a turbo shaft engine that prevents unwanted solid matter from entering. Depending on the helicopter and engine type it may or may not have closable vanes that can be opened for better airflow when in clear air.

When I started crewing CH-47 Chinooks in the 60's we didn't have particle separators. We had significant turbine blade erosion on our engines, especially when operating in dusty areas, which was more often than not.

The pic below shows a particle separator mounted on a CH-53. The closable vanes can be seen on the front end.

Thanks. That is interesting to me as I took out a patent for a lifting surface driven by coanda slits, and one of the concerns not addressed was what would happen in dusty conditions. I have since, modified the design to allow transition, but had again not addressed this problem.

There doesn't appear to be any automatic clearing of the debris collected in the videos on u-tube so presumably this was a maintenance issue, although there was some device for bypassing, and another for blowing dust out. Seem to be using cyclones.

Well, the particle separator in the pic is just one of probably dozens of designs. The first one I ever came across was a simple wire screen style mounted on CH-47B engines. It was a wire screen in a cone shape with probably 1/4" or so gaps between crossed wires for air flow. It kept bugs and birds out, but I didn't like it as I felt the engines weren't generating military power when asked. Fortunately the NASA mission we had with the Chinook didn't require any load lifting at all so it didn't matter. But they've been evolving over the years. I'm absolutely certain crew chiefs would be screaming for an auto clean out or easy manual clean out feature.

Funny you should mention the coanda slits. When I was an apprentice machinist at NASA in the early '70's I was on a project that was a "blown wing". We built a scale model wing that fit across our 6' wind tunnel. The wing had thousands of pin holes in it through which we blew compressed air while the tunnel was operating. The idea was to separate the boundary layer from the skin, thus reducing parasitic drag. It worked pretty well but would probably have been pretty unmaintainable in full scale operation. There was no way to effectively keep it clean to avoid the risk of asymmetrical drag from plugged holes. You might want to check for prior art on that subject though I think any possible NASA patents would be long expired. And, as far as I know, no aircraft manufacturers picked up the technology.

https://www.aircraftnerds.com/2017/07/what-are-aircraft-slats-and-how-do-aircraft-slats-work.html