Non-Strike Wildlife Events: Just as Important as a Strike?

Eagle-eyed* readers may have noticed the new menu item at the top. This new page outlines my PhD research project which is looking into wildlife strike reporting practices and standards. By pure coincidence, a couple of my favourite Youtube channels have just featured wildlife-related aviation events that did not involve collisions with birds. These types of events go to heart of my motivation for taking on my particular research question.

A Lack of Consensus

If you spend a little bit of time looking at wildlife strike data from different jurisdictions or even just different airports, you will probably find slight variations in how some events are reported. A collision between an aircraft and a bird that is witnessed with some physical evidence (a carcass, snarge or some damage) is pretty straight forward. But a carcass found on the runway or runway strip, observing a bird being killed by jet-blast or wing-tip vortices, or an aircraft going around due to birds, these are more difficult.

When you bring these issues to a forum of wildlife hazard management professionals, the politest way of describing what happens is to say that there is a lack of consensus.

Reaching a Consensus

The problem of building a consensus amongst experts is not new. Way back in the 1960s, some smart guys at the RAND Corporation developed a technique designed to bring experts together. Essentially, by taking ego, pride, and other social pressures out of the process. They developed what is called the Delphi method.

In a nutshell, this technique uses an anonymous expert panel who establish the scope of the study and then are asked to score or rank the questions within the study over several rounds. Following each round, the spread of answers is calculated and provided to the panel with the next round questionnaire. Each panel member is expected to re-evaluate their responses in relation to the group. The survey ends when either a consensus is reached or subsequent rounds are not having any effect.

Using this technique, I am hoping to develop a framework for wildlife hazard event reporting that will have or gain widespread support and build consistency in our reporting data.

Why is this Important?

In short, because I believe the nature of the hazard posed by wildlife to aviation is bigger than just the confirmed strike numbers presented in various reports. Effective risk management tends to rely on good reporting of actual events as well as near-miss events and hazardous scenarios.

The following two videos highlight two such scenarios.

Delays

Avoiding a bird strike is a good thing, isn’t it?

And yet, I can’t help shaking the idea that avoiding a wildlife strike could be both good wildlife hazard management and poor wildlife hazard management. Ongoing research out of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) on air traffic control alerting of bird hazards is a great initiative and could see bird strike numbers go down.

But business pressures in the face of reducing strike numbers (or rates) could lead to reductions in wildlife hazard management budgets. Insidiously, delays would go up and with them fuel burn, costs and customer dissatisfaction. So, the hazard still isn’t being managed, we’re just not necessarily measuring its impact.

Non-Strike Risks

Some wildlife hazards don’t involve collisions between the animal and the aircraft at all. In fact, some incidents don’t actually involve an animal at all but they are the result of, in some way, wildlife hazard management activities. This incident happened at Brisbane and as you hear in this amazing breakdown, it stemmed from the hazard posed by mud-wasps.

This incident is a risk management nerd’s dream. Firstly, no death, injuries or destruction. And more importantly, it involves a complex set of management and human behaviours that combined to produce the “perfect storm” of latent conditions and active failures.

This video is beautifully detailed. So, the only point I want to highlight here is to note that the pitot covers that “caused” this incident are themselves risk control measures. They are the perfect example of introducing something (a tool, process or activity) that is completely reasonable to address the wildlife risk that then go on to result in a separate flight safety risk materialising.

And We Still Get Strikes

While I’ve been preparing this post, another ATC recording video was released and is another reminder that wildlife strikes remain a significant risk to aviation.

Follow Along or, Perhaps, Be Involved

I’ll be posting regular updates here on the main page and on my new PhD page. I still have a couple of administrative hoops to jump through (e.g. ethics approval) but I am hoping to be seeking expressions of interest from prospective expert panel members later in the year.

You can stay up to date with my progress and potentially be involved by checking in regularly here or connecting with me on LinkedIn.

Header image: Janiere Fernandez (via Pexels)

*And Moses is back to say: