Chattanooga airport shows nation’s biggest increase in bird strikes

Lovell Field officials said Friday a sharp upturn in reported bird strikes to aircraft is due to an aggressive stance they’ve implemented in a wildlife hazard program.

“They’ve gone above and beyond,” said airport spokeswoman Christina Siebold. “Safety is our No. 1 priority.”

Airport officials say they plan to continue the program.

In new data released Friday by the Federal Aviation Administration, Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport registered the biggest increase in wildlife strikes nationally since 2000. The airport went from four reported incidents in 2000 to 55 in 2008, or up 1,275 percent, the FAA information showed.

Under FAA rules, such strikes include everything from a bird simply running into some part of the plane and causing no damage to catastrophic incidents where a bird can get sucked into a jet engine, destroying it.

Chattanooga’s airport has seen “no incidents or accidents” due to wildlife strikes that caused a plane to crash or abort takeoff or caused any injuries, Ms. Siebold said.

“Our proactive approach to identifying wildlife strikes has increased our reports, but we believe this process is critical in driving our efforts to mitigate any potential wildlife hazards,” Ms. Siebold said.

On Friday, the FAA made good on its promise to release records of where and when airplanes have struck birds over the last 19 years. It’s the first time the FAA has disclosed the information.

The disclosures come thanks largely to pressure after the dramatic ditching of a US Airways jet in the Hudson River in January after bird strikes knocked out both its engines.

The FAA published the data on the Internet. It lists details for more than 89,000 incidents since 1990, including 28 cases since 2000 when a collision with a bird or other animal such as a deer on a runway was so severe that the aircraft was considered destroyed.

The data shows that since 2000, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York reported at least 30 accidents where damage was either substantial or the plane was actually destroyed.

Ms. Siebold said increased reports of bird strikes are rarely the result of radical changes in bird populations at an airport.

“More likely, they are due to increased diligence by airports in monitoring and reporting any suspected strikes — a completely voluntary process,” she said.

The Chattanooga airport’s wildlife hazard plan includes staff checking the airfield three times daily for animals, part of a larger inspection list.

In addition, the airport uses horns, sirens or shellcrackers — a small handgun or shotgun that discharges material that explodes and makes a loud noise — to frighten birds away, officials have said.

The FAA evaluates the Chattanooga airport on its wildlife hazard plan, and local officials review it annually.

Still, James Dillard, a vice president at Chattanooga’s T.J. Snow Co., said he experienced a bird strike at Lovell Field in spring 2007 when he was a student flying with an instructor. They were about to take off from the runway when the plane suddenly ran into a flock of small, black birds, he said.

“It was so fast, nobody could have avoided them,” Mr. Dillard said. “I hit a bunch of them.”

Jimmy Campbell, owner of Apollo Travel, said while bird strikes have become an issue nationally, he has never had a traveler ask about them. While there may be reasons not to fly out of an airport, fear of birds shouldn’t be one of them, he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.