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Lessons from the Hudson
Published in Erik Hollnagel, Jean Pariès, David Woods, John Wreathall, Resilience Engineering in Practice, 2017
The main hazard at the heart of the Flight 1549 accident scenario is what aviation people call ‘bird hazard’: in-flight collisions with birds, damaging the aircraft engines or the aircraft airframe. Bird strikes are exactly the opposite of unexpected events: they have been a well recognised aviation problem for decades. Actually, the first reported collision between an airplane and a bird is apparently as old as aviation: it happened to Orville Wright in 1905 (Bird Strike Committee-USA, 2009)! Things got considerably worse with the introduction of jet aircraft. Higher speeds increased the impact energy and jet engines demonstrated both a strong tendency to inhale birds and a chronic fragility to their impact. With the growth of aviation, bird strikes have become a very common event. From 1990–2004, over 56,000 bird strikes to civil aircraft were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US. This is considered to be a mere 20 per cent of the number that likely occurred. Worldwide, the bird strike damage cost to civil aviation is estimated to be over one billion dollars. And the issue is not only losses in dollars. In the 1990s the US Bird Strike Committee estimated that there is a 25 per cent chance in any decade that birds could cause a major airline crash.
Air transport safety: A basic issue for aviation insurers
Published in Hans M. Soekkha, Aviation Safety, 2020
Benito Pagnanelli, Paolo Albanese
At a meeting of the Bird Strike Committee USA in mid-July 1996, the FAA presented a report covering 6,159 bird strikes in the USA from 1993 to 1995. Damage was reported in 979 cases (15% of incidents). Information was provided on cost/down-time for 25% of the damage cases in the three year period. It totalled USD 26.8m and 30,000 hours. From this the FAA estimates that the cost of damage due to bird strikes in the USA is USD 35.7m per annum and 40,000 hours of down-time.
Training for Competence
Published in Norman MacLeod, Crew Resource Management Training, 2021
Before moving on to the issues of what to train, how to train it and, then, measuring performance, I want to just return to the core question that arose in Chapter 1: what is training supposed to achieve? I suggested that a good starting point was Wood’s view of a competence model as being an understanding of the variability and uncertainty faced by an operator – the demand side – coupled with an understanding of how the strategies, plans and countermeasures provided by the organisation – the supply side – will handle these. This book has elaborated on aspects of these two questions. In terms of variability and uncertainty, when we looked at the idea of threats we saw that these were, on the one hand, attributes of the operating environment that require a response from crew but, on the other hand, by their very nature they can induce anxiety and increase workload, thereby impairing crew in proportion to an individual’s susceptibility. Figure 11.1 illustrates environmental variability. It shows the distribution of safety reports recording bird strikes submitted by one airline across a year. Most bird strikes are inconsequential but some can cause severe damage to an engine or, in the case of the Miracle on the Hudson, can even cripple an aircraft. The demand side of the equation requires that crew must cope not just with the range of environmental conditions encompassed by the operation but also the implications, manifested as stress and fatigue. Non-ergodicity dictates that crew will have to be able to constantly modify plans in real time. Because of cross-scale interactions, we know that crew may well be presented with device configurations and technical systems behaviours that have lain dormant or were not fully communicated. The crew will have to cope with conflicting goals, especially when working across organisational boundaries. On the supply side, we know that interfaces will be opaque, that policies and procedures will be underspecified and that the organisational context will trigger frustration and resistance.
Predicting and mitigating failures on the flight deck: an aircraft engine bird strike scenario
Published in Ergonomics, 2022
Victoria Banks, Craig K. Allison, Katie Parnell, Katherine Plant, Neville A. Stanton
According to Mao, Meguid, and Ng (2008), more than 90% of foreign object debris (FOD) damages to aircraft engines can be attributed to avian creatures. This makes engine bird strikes a leading safety concern within the aviation industry (Hedayati, Sadighi, and Mohammadi-Aghdam 2014). Bird strike events are not rare (Nicholson and Reed 2011), in fact, bird strikes occurred as soon as aircraft took to the skies, with the first being recorded by Wilbur Wright in 1905 (Guida et al. 2013). Engine bird strikes can often be benign, but they do also have the potential to cause significant disruption and flight safety ramifications (Nicholson and Reed 2011; Guida et al. 2013). Dolbeer et al. (2019) cite bird strikes as being responsible for more than 287 fatalities and the loss of 263 aircraft over the last thirty years.
Material parametric optimisation of wing leading edge profile against soft body impact
Published in International Journal of Crashworthiness, 2022
Aircraft always fly with the risk of impacting foreign objects such as birds, hailstone, runway debris, and tire fragments. Statistics show that 90% of all these events are reported to be caused by a bird strike and which causes the major economic loss to the aerospace industry [1]. The estimated annual damage due to bird strike cost the aviation industry worldwide over the US $1.2 billion each year [2]. Bird strike incidents occur especially critical during take-off and landing phases. Impact with a large bird at very high speeds can destroy an aircraft and this is one reason for limiting maximum airplane speeds to 250 knots (464 km/h) at altitudes below 10,000 feet (3048 m) [3]. Thus, resistance to bird-strike is the major design factor and an aircraft must satisfy the standard regulations defined by different aviation authorities before its first service [4].
Dynamic response of bird strike on variable stiffness laminates of composite leading edge
Published in International Journal of Crashworthiness, 2022
Anti-bird strike design can be broken down into three subcategories: avoiding bird strikes, resisting bird strikes and tolerating bird strikes. First, bird strike avoidance encompasses measures intended to monitor bird activity, drives them away from air traffic and routes aircraft to avoid bird concentrations. Second, bird strike resistance is the part of aircraft structure design intended to reduce damage taken from any impact that occurs. Effective designs will prevent debilitating damage to key systems and components. Finally, bird strike toleration is the term applied to an aircraft's ability to continue operating safety even if the structure is unable to resist damage. Redundant systems play a big role in these situations. In [4], Feng Sun, Qin Sun, Lei Ni and Ke Liang introduced a novel structural connection of the vertical tail leading edge for anti-bird strike design. This study focuses on the changing stiffness design of the skin for resisting bird strikes.