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Friday, April 21, 2000

Dogs Battling Bird Threat

By John J. Lumpkin
Journal Staff Writer
    KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE — Gene LeBoeuf and Maj. Peter Windler are trying to build a better scarecrow.
    But instead of protecting crops, they are trying to protect military aircraft and human lives from "things that don't get tower clearance and end up in front of aircraft," says LeBoeuf.
    It's a grim reality of powered flight — birds get sucked into jet engines, sometimes causing them to lose power. They smash canopies, flaps and rudders. At the speeds jets travel, a collision with a 4-pound bird can do tremendous damage to a plane, LeBoeuf said.
    From 1985 to 1999, there have been 39,854 recorded bird collisions with Air Force aircraft, according to statistics provided by the military. Most of the collisions take place at low altitudes, many of them near airfields.
    The collisions have done more than half a billion dollars in damage. Sixteen planes have been lost, and 36 people have been killed. Twenty-four died in a single crash when a radar early warning aircraft ran into a flock of geese just after takeoff from its Alaska base.
    LeBoeuf and Windler are the core of the "Bird/Wildlife Aircraft Strike Hazard Team" — the acronym is BASH — at Kirtland's Air Force Safety Center. They advise military bases around the world on how to keep birds and other critters away from aircraft and try to come up with new ways to do so.
    Their latest trick is borrowed from keepers of golf courses: release high-energy Border Collies to chase birds away.
    And at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Shadow and Monty have started work taking on the swarms of Canada geese that stay near the base airfield.
    "Birds around the base have pretty much gone to zero" since the dogs started work, said Maj. Frank Smolinsky, a Dover spokesman. Dover is home to huge C-5 Galaxy cargo planes.
    A hired handler, Nick Carter gives commands to Shadow and Monty while they are on the airfield. Carter runs Border Collie Rescue, a rescue network for the breed. The base pays $7,400 a month for its services.
    "We have spent $1.2 million on repairs to C-5 aircraft (from bird damage) over the last two years," Smolinsky said. "This price is a small price to pay."
    But dogs are but "one tool in a toolbox" and may not work everywhere, LeBoeuf said.
    Aircraft are built to resist some bird damage. Air Force engineers use the "chicken gun" to fire dead chickens into jet engines under development to measure effects of a bird strike.
    Techniques to control birds near an airfield generally fall into three areas, he said. First, airfield managers try to change the environment around the airfield to make it less attractive to birds. This could mean draining a swamp, getting rid of a prairie dog colony, which provides food for predator birds, or simply cutting the grass.
    Second, they try to scare the birds off. Some bases use pyrotechnics and fireworks. Others use remote-controlled aircraft. Airfield managers must continue to use these or the birds will come back, LeBoeuf said.
    Finally, they will shoot birds that won't leave. They have to get permits to kill most species and can't touch endangered animals.
    LeBoeuf and Windler acknowledge many of these methods anger environmentalists. But they see it as a matter of human needs exceeding those of the animals.
    "We cannot afford to drop an airplane down on an apartment complex," Windler said.
    Some "bird strikes" take place far from airfields, on low-level missions. An Air Force B-1 bomber went down over Colorado in 1987 after it struck a bird in flight on a low-altitude, high-speed training mission. Three of the six crew members survived after bailing out, according to the Web site of the Bird Strike Committee USA, a joint government-industry group trying to limit the problem.
    Bird-plane collisions occur in civilian aviation, as well, although they are rarely publicized, LeBoeuf said.
    In 1988, 31 of 105 passengers were killed when the engines on an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner failed after they ingested several pigeons during takeoff from Bahar Dar, Ethiopia. The plane took off and made a crash landing after it returned to the airport.