what I learned today

[maribou]

Airports often employ FALCONERS (and their falcons/hawks) to keep other kinds of small birds/mammals scared away, hence cutting down on animal-related accidents / wear and tear. How keen is that??? I am truly delighted, and Dorval and Pearson Airports just went up about 5 orders of magnitude on my esteem meter (you can almost *see* them now).

Comments

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

A bird, even just a pigeon, can be truly catastrophic when sucked into a jet engine.  If you're lucky all that happens is that you lose that engine and the pilot recovers gracefully and the plane is out of order to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars of maintenance (for the big jets, anyway).  Things go rapidly downhill from there.  The Kremlin also employs falconers, to deal with the pigeon problem in Red Square (or they did, at least).  Normally they'd just shoot the pigeons, but it was thought that gunfire around the Kremlin might be a bad idea, for all sorts of reasons.

[shebear.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing something about using falcons on the Travel Channel, about this hotel in the Middle East. They showed them taking them out every morning to patrol the area around the hotel. Very cool.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Probably less glamorous, but the local landfill also uses falconers. Birds are a big problem for landfills.

[lilituc.livejournal.com]

Also used at Central Park. (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=857&ncid=757&e=10&u=/nm/20030807/od_uk_nm/oukoe_life_hawks)

[banger7.livejournal.com]

And just in case the falcons don't work, jet designers test their engines with the chicken gun (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_170b.html)!

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

We'd announce hawks and eagles when flying in the pattern at Fort/Love airport because they can destroy a light plane with ease. (If you hit one with the prop and break one blade, the engine can shake itself off the aircraft, with the result that the aircraft will fall tail-first instead of nose-first and be completely uncontrollable.)