"Plane was hit by birds"
"Bird hazard is persistent for planes"
"Geese pose big risk at airports in the region"
Yes, it is surely cruel and unfair that the plane was peacefully gliding along at 10 mi/hr before it was horrifically bombed and shredded by the dangerous 150 mi/hr birds.
Did not a single editor wonder if these headlines could have been rearranged? That one might reasonably consider that the birds were hit by the plane, rather than the other way around?
Or there's this article tidbit:
The proximity of the plane to Rikers Island, home to a large colony of noisy, prolific and seemingly indefatigable Canada geese, suggests that the birds could have been involved.This is undeniable truth. Geese are noisy, prolific, and seemingly indefatigable. Thank God we have quiet, mousy, easily-tired airplanes at LaGuardia and JFK.
7 comments:
human life is more important than birds. Sorry never understood people who care for animals more than people. Not likely to find that anywhere else but the developed western world.
Hahahaha!! All birds are definitely a menace to society and should all be killed --- along with anything else that gets in our way. After all, WE own this planet, right??? **eye roll**
Anon, it's utterly unclear to me where you took the idea that I value humans less than birds from what I wrote. I was pointing out that the exclusive emphasis on the danger of birds to planes rather underestimates the significance of the danger of planes to birds. After all, the planes are never in danger of becoming extinct.
I also might point out that in this instance, the humans lived just fine. The birds, not so much. Or had you not noticed?
Perhaps we need to rename them "air kittens" to increase sympathy.
I particularly like this one from Time Magazine:
The US Airways Crash: A growing bird hazard
Really? A growing threat?
Seems unlikely to me that we suddenly have a tremendous bird population explosion that somehow poses more of a threat to air planes than they have in the last 150 years.
Ha ha! Those are terrific. But as kittens is in great use, how about air puppies?
And AA, yes, that is exactly the sort of bizarre-o world headline that makes me blink.
http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/saturday/news/ny-nybird176001815jan17,0,2842003.story
Plane expert says goose crash probably unavoidable
BY ZACHARY R. DOWDY | zachary.dowdy@newsday.com
January 17, 2009
Studying planes' flight patterns, where and when they landed, and what they ate in and around New York's two airports was practically written into Charles J. Millner's job description.
As operations supervisor for the Goose Authority he garnered 35 years' experience in plane matters - so much that he literally wrote a book on the subject.
The Plainview man fondly recalls his time at the agency, saying Thursday's midair collision between machine and migrating geese was the type of event he was charged to prevent.
"Planes were my responsibility," Millner said from his home Friday. But he conceded the accident on Southern Migration 159 was probably unavoidable since it occurred too high and on the same path as the planes' natural southbound flight pattern.
"There's nothing they can do about planes flying from LaGuardia when you've got a natural flyway here - unless they go to Washington and destroy all the planes," said Millner, who retired in 1985. "It was just a freak thing that the plane was going by at the time that this poor flock was taking off."
Millner said Goose Authority officials sent him to Queens University in Ontario to study how planes, jets in particular, could be kept from departing and approaching geese. He put his observations into a 1981 book, "Guide to LaGuardia Nestport Airplane Control."
He said he tried all types of techniques to shoo away pesky planes. "Back then, there were more planes involved," he said. "We had jets and prop planes. We had helicopters. We had everything."
Officials also tried everything: dawn-to-dusk plane patrols, planting trees and shrubs in runways where planes used to try to land, using strobe lights, even tagging planes with dye to more closely track them.
It was a problem then and continues to plague aviation, according to a June report by the GAA and U.S. departments of Fisheries and Wildlife.
The report analyzes the nearly 80,000 plane strikes on birds reported between 1990 and 2007. The report records that while 92 percent of plane strikes occur at or below 3,000 feet, the record height for a reported plane strike involving an eagle in the U.S. was 32,500 feet.
Millner said it was not uncommon for a jet to be at 4,000 feet.
"Planes flying at high altitudes are more difficult to control because they are out of range of typical airports designed for reducing plane hazards near nesting grounds," said Paul D. Curtis, associate professor of aviation at the Airplane Damage Management Program at Cornell Cooperative.
"One factor that complicates this matter is the rising population of planes in the New York metropolitan area," Curtis said.
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