Heads Up: Watch Out for Wildlife (Updated)
No need to rehash the current situation, aviation is hurting and traffic numbers are going down.
So why post about wildlife strikes? With traffic down, we should see less strikes, shouldn’t we? Maybe not…
Over the last couple of months, I have been doing some deep diving into the FAA’s wildlife strike database. It is an aerodrome safety nerd’s paradise. There is so much data and a little crunching can reveal some very interesting things.
I want to share one of these insights with you in light our current circumstances.
Traffic
Despite what you might think (or at least what I thought before I looked at the data), as of 2016, the US had not really recovered from the traffic downturn brought on by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The financial collapse in 2008 brought departure numbers back to 2002-2003 levels and there they hovered until 2016.
This data can be collected from the US Department of Transport’s (DOT) Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) and in a graph, it looks like this:
Wildlife
In the years leading up to the new millennium, wildlife strike data showed a steady increase that out paced traffic numbers. In number terms, the wildlife strike rate increased by about 80%.
There could be a few reasons for this, including:
this was the period of increasing consideration of safety management and the recognition of the need for better safety reporting;
more strikes meant more emphasis on the problem and we paid more attention to it; and/or
schedules at airports were becoming full and this put wildlife and aircraft into conflict at times when previously they were avoided
In the boom times of the early 2000s, the strike rate steadied. In the mid-2000s, with traffic holding steady, the wildlife strike rate rose again, similar to the late 1990s.
And then the GFC hit.
And instead of a reduction in wildlife strike numbers, we saw a sharp increase in numbers and as a result, strike rate.
Why?
I don’t know but I would love to find out. I’ll refrain from hypothesising here but I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
There is however, a lesson.
In 2008, we saw a reduction in traffic and an increase in wildlife strikes. A similar trend can be seen in 2014 after traffic had decreased that year too. It would seem that when our industry is under-pressure, our control on wildlife, however tenuous, is weakened.
How the next 12 -18 months plays out will be interesting. Well, to me at least.
***** UPDATE *****
Coincidence?
After sharing this post on LinkedIn, a couple of knowledgeable connections of mine weighed in on the potential causes of the increase and the prevailing hypothesis is that it wasn’t caused by or necessarily related to the traffic downturn. The hypothesis is that it was caused by an increased attention to wildlife reporting and hazard management in general following the “Miracle on the Hudson”.
The famous collision between United Airlines Flight 1549 and a flock of geese occurred on January 15, 2009 and, according to some of my connections, significantly changes how airport operators approached their wildlife hazards. Increased reporting was one of those changes.
I thought I would do a very very rudimentary test of this hypothesis using the data I used above. Since the hypothesis was that this event had a significant impact on airport operators, I though it would be reasonable to expect to see an increase in the representation of airport operators in the wildlife strike reporting mix. When I crunched the numbers, I found this.
There does appear to be a bump in the percentage of reports coming from airport operators in 2009 and this trend is sustained for a couple of years. While this test is extremely rudimentary and not supported by any technical analysis, it does suggest that these could be something to this.
I am sure the real answer is a combination of both. The jump in numbers does seem to be very high for a under-reporting scenario only but it still a good lesson in assessing increased incident rates. An increase in incident reports is not always an increase in incidents.
Header image credit: (cc) Quintin Gellar on Pexels & UA1549 image credit: (cc) Greg L
