FEATHERED FOES - STUDY OF IRAQ BIRDS TO HELP REDUCE AIRCRAFT MISHAPS

  • Published
  • By 1st. Lt. LISA SPILINEK
  • 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs (AFPN)
Balad AB, Iraq --  One of the Air Force's greatest airpower adversaries doesn't wear the uniform of another country; it wears feathers.

Both deadly and expensive, aircraft accidents and mishaps caused by collisions with birds have cost the service approximately $35 million each year since 1985, according to Air Force safety records. So what happens when U.S. forces deploy to foreign lands at locations such as Balad Air Base, Iraq, where they aren't as familiar with the local wildlife as they are back home?

"Bird strikes have a very negative impact on the mission," said Capt. Andrew Baumgart, a 23rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot. "In the best case scenario, they will cause additional maintenance man-hours for minor repairs, inspections and cleanup. In the worst case scenario, they can cause the loss of a multimillion dollar warfighting asset. Either way it has a very negative impact on our ability to generate more sorties and continued air coverage for our guys on the ground."

To better understand their winged rivals, Air Force safety personnel have for years shipped feather, blood and tissue samples from bird strikes and bird depredation efforts to be analyzed at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Feather Identification Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Sometimes the remains of whole birds also were shipped to the laboratory to be studied from locations in the United States, but never from Iraq ... until now.

Members of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing safety office at Balad sent their first shipment of whole bird carcasses, obtained through bird depredation efforts, to the Feather Lab May 3, said Tech. Sgt. David Young, the 332nd AEW noncommissioned officer in charge of flight safety, who is deployed from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska.

The sergeant heads up the Balad AB Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard program, better known as BASH, through which trained volunteers shoot birds that pose threats to aircraft. The Feather Lab experts will examine the more than 40 birds shipped from Balad to determine what species live in the vicinity.

The shipment represents a win-win situation for the Smithsonian and the busy air base, where multiple types of aircraft take off and land 24/7. According to Young, 124 bird strikes were recorded on Balad AB aircraft from October 2006 to October 2007.

"Sending (the birds) to the Smithsonian will help establish what the species are here and their migratory routes," Young said. "We don't have that kind of data here."

The data on the shipped birds will be compiled and evaluated by the Smithsonian laboratory experts and provided to the Balad AB safety office. Understanding the types of birds that live near Balad's extremely busy runways will help the safety personnel take actions to reduce their nesting habitats and bring down the bird populations around the airfield.

Additionally, if mission requirements permit, flights could be scheduled to avoid peak hours of bird activity, said Lt. Col. Ken Ekman, the 332nd AEW Safety chief, who is deployed from Shaw AFB, S.C.

The Smithsonian will benefit from the whole bird shipment, as well. Of the 620,000 bird specimens that it currently has, only eight are from Iraq and those represent only four species, said Dr. Carla Dove of the Smithsonian's Feather Lab.

"Whole bird samples are the basis of all taxonomic and systematic research on birds," she said. "The birds are skinned, stuffed with cotton and kept in the museum collection forever. Having these specimens available for study will be a great benefit to our identification program and to the study of birds of that region. When specimens are catalogued into our collections, they are available for researchers all over the world to come to study or to borrow for examination."

Another benefit of receiving whole birds is that experts can match unknown specimen feathers to whole bird samples.

"Whole specimens benefit the bird strike identification program tremendously," Dove said. "I plan to use the specimens (from Balad) to obtain the DNA sequence to add to our database. That way, even if we get a small blood or tissue sample that does not have feathers, we can possibly get an identification using the DNA."

While some of the types of birds sent from Balad are yet to be determined by Dove and the rest of the identification experts at the Feather Lab, they have been able to identify some from photographs taken by Young. These include white wagtails, white-cheeked bulbuls, falcated teals, Egyptian nightjars, black-headed gulls, blue-cheeked bee-eaters, white-breasted kingfishers, golden orioles, stone curlews, shrikes, European rollers, spur-winged plovers and red-wattled plovers. The rest will be identified after arriving in Washington D.C.

In the end, the science behind identification will help the safety personnel at Balad to understand the local area airpower challengers better.

"By understanding the exact species of birds that cause problems to aircraft and flight safety, we can begin to do things to prevent the damage from occurring," Dove said. "The flight safety group will use the data to understand the movements and migratory patterns of birds and to know which bird species are causing problems. Species identification is the first step in bird strike prevention."

For pilots, the experience of hitting a bird can be troubling.

"Hitting a bird while flying is difficult to describe," said Baumgart, who is deployed from Spangdahlem AB, Germany. "When you're flying 200 to 300 knots, you either never see the bird or you see just streaks of black as they fly by. The unsettling part is not knowing the extent of the damage when you know you've hit one."

The captain has firsthand experience on this.

"Not too long ago, I hit a (large hawk) on my approach to landing," he said. "What concerned me was that I never even saw it. I just felt a dull thud. After landing, the crew said the bird was wrapped around the top of my nose gear. Another 6, or maybe 9 inches higher, and it would have gone right down the intake, destroying the motor. There was minor damage to the nose gear."

While the Balad AB safety personnel realize that eliminating the threat of bird strikes altogether is impossible, they are doing their best to mitigate the risks of bird strikes occurring.

"Safety is about reacting to mishaps and preventing future mishaps," Ekman said. "The Smithsonian lacks specimens and data on bird migratory patterns in Iraq. By feeding the Smithsonian info and helping them build their database for species collection, we in turn can be much more preventative in our actions to counter Balad's bird population."

For Young, it's a matter of risk management.

"We can't get rid of (the bird problem); we can only try to minimize it," he said. "It's about making it safer for our pilots."

Still, the sergeant has learned a lot about his fowl foes.

"I didn't even know there were different types of gulls," Young said. "I thought they were all seagulls. I've learned more about birds here than I have in my whole life -- their habitats and migratory patterns."

More importantly, he's learning how to combat them to keep American pilots and airplanes safer in the sky over Iraq.