Birds—they think they own the skies. Ever since the Wright Brothers they've been vying for supremacy up there, landing their first fatal blow in 1912 by downing a plane into the surf off Long Beach, California. Yesterday's emergency landing in the Hudson River was just the latest chapter in an ongoing pitched battle between bird and plane. Of course, from the point of view of the Canada geese believed to have been consumed by both engines of U.S. Airways Airbus A320, yesterday's strike must have seemed a bit of a Pyrrhic victory (though there's probably a sweet flock of virgin geese greeting them in the afterlife, hey-oh).
Mary Cummings, an aviation professor at MIT, tells the Daily News that bird strikes have become more of a problem the last few years. Nearly 500 planes have been damaged by collisions with birds since 2000, the FAA says, causing an estimated $600 million a year in damage. According to the Times, the most recent incident took place at JKF in December 2006, when a great blue heron was swallowed by the engine of a Boeing 767 jet shortly after takeoff. (The plane returned to the airport with no injuries...besides the heron.)
At La Guardia, the last bird strike was in 2003, when an American Airlines Fokker (heh) 100 plane hit a flock of geese upon takeoff, causing the right engine to fail and diverting the flight to JFK. The News reports that Port Authority officials have been at odds with animal-rights activists for years over their efforts to thin the geese population on Rikers Island near La Guardia. (Activists want nonlethal methods for managing the population.) At JFK, they use falcons; here's a killer video.
