Robot vs Bird

Some may remember the Alfred Hitchcock horror film entitled "Birds", but in the airport industry it seems that this is more than a vague memory of a classic! Every year there is damage, not extensive per say, to many aircraft due to birds on the airstrip being hit by the airplane. For years, birds have been attracted to airfields in the same way a duck is attracted to water: open space. They enjoy strutting along the tarmacs, or maybe they just like hanging out with the newer "breed" of motorized birds.

In answer to these feathered pests, Korean designers engineered an automatic robotic vehicle to roam the airport and scare away birds. Not such a big deal, just design it to go in a pattern to cover the most ground and stay out from under the airplanes. Bingo.

But no, the Koreans wanted a smarter robot than that. This robot is controlled from a central station and not only scares the birds away, but listens for the birds and records any information that it can glean from them. Such as where they hang out, what times are they around, and what are the most effective ways of getting rid of them.

There's a problem, its not programmed to drive around by itself, someone has to sit in a simulator and drive it virtually, and control which 'noise' to use when to scare the birds away. So an airport needs to buy the robot, all the charging equipment and fuel, then a whole additional 'space station' to run it. All to keep birds away from planes.

Here's the kicker, according to an International Civil Aviation Organization study, only 420 aircraft were damaged since 2003. That's almost ten years. So every year, 42 airplanes are damaged. Now that doesn't sound like a small number until you put it into perspective; that's less than half of an incident every year per country. Statistically speaking, of modern countries, any one country will only ever have 1 damaged airplane every other year. Yet they will spend how much money to buy this robot to run all the time and maintain to stop 5 incidents in ten years? Seems a long ways to go to just keep a few feathers off the field.

See original article on CNN World News:
http://www.cnngo.com/seoul/visit/birdstrike-robot-779434?hpt=hp_bn8