WASHINGTON — Commercial airline crews reported more than two dozen emergency landings, aborted takeoffs or other hair-raising incidents due to collisions with birds in the past two years, according to a confidential database managed by NASA.
An Associated Press review of reports filed with NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System shows that bird-airliner encounters happen frequently, though none as dramatic as the one involving a US Airways jet that ditched safely into the Hudson River on Jan. 15 because a run-in with birds took out both of its engines.
Since January 2007, at least 26 serious bird strikes were reported. In some of them, the aircraft’s brakes caught fire or cabins and cockpits filled with smoke and the stench of burning birds. Engines failed and fan blades broke.
The NASA data do not include details such as the names of crews, airlines and, in many cases, the airports involved — confidentiality designed to encourage greater reporting.
From 1990 to 2007, there were nearly 80,000 reported incidents of birds striking nonmilitary aircraft, about one strike for every 10,000 flights, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Agriculture Department. Those numbers are based on voluntary reports, which aviation safety experts say almost certainly underestimate the size of the problem.
Among the cases, in June 2007, a Boeing 757-200 at Denver International Airport was forced to abort a takeoff at between 150 mph and 160 mph after a flock of birds flew into the path of the plane. Some birds were sucked into both engines, the pilot reported.
