Simulation Model to Calculate Bird-Aircraft Collisions and Near Misses in the Airport Vicinity

Abstract

Annually, thousands of birds collide with aircraft. The impact usually has lethal consequences for the bird. Depending on the circumstances, also the involved aircraft can suffer severe damage. The highest bird strike risk occurs at low altitudes. Therefore, measures to reduce this risk are widely applied at airports. However, also during flight phases at low altitudes, especially within the adjacent arrival and departure corridors of an airport, there is a higher risk of collisions between birds and aircraft. These areas are typically not reached by the airport's counteracting measures. To analyse risk-reducing measures in all areas with increased collision risk, a fast-time bird strike simulation environment was developed. It uses an open-source Air Traffic Management simulator as a base. The simulator was enhanced with a model to represent bird movements and to recognize collisions between birds and aircraft. Bird strikes depend on various parameters such as season, weather and surrounding ecosystems. In absolute terms, bird strikes represent relatively rare occurrences. To confirm that the simulation environment generates reproducible results even with a limited number of datasets, Monte-Carlo simulations were performed. They included bird movement data from one year and air traffic flight plans for various air traffic volumes. As expected due to the nature of randomness in bird strike occurrences, the number of bird strikes showed variance within the individual replications of the Monte-Carlo simulations. The results indicate that the predictability of the number of occurrences increases with rising number of birds, and rising air traffic intensity. Synthesis and applications. This study evaluated the robustness of a simulation environment for simulating the risk of bird strikes. By considering simulation scenarios including bird movement information from all seasons and a sufficient air traffic volume, the described set-up leads to stable results within the individual replications. Therefore, it can serve as a valuable tool to research novel measures to reduce the risk of bird strikes.