TWO years ago, almost to the very day, Michel Reddan, Air France's former head of meteorology, gave a lecture to the Irish Meteorological Society on eruptions of volcanic ash and their importance as potential aviation hazards. He must have gone down well with the assembled weather-buffs, because he has been invited back again, and tomorrow evening at 8 p.m. at the Earlsfort Terrace premises of UCD, his chosen specialised subject will be birds.
Now Monsieur Reddan will not concern himself tomorrow with the place of birds in weather lore. Neither will he address the question of the inspiration they have given aviators, as for example, when the young would-be-glider Otto Lilienthal gazed at them for hours, seeking to unlock the secret of their seeming weightlessness. Michel Reddan's topic, on the contrary, will be the negative contribution of our feathered friends: Bird Hazards at Aerodromes will describe the nasty habit birds occasionally have of getting in the way of aeroplanes.
"Bird-strikes", as they are called, cause millions of pounds of damage every year, by damaging propellers, shattering windscreens, or more usually nowadays, by being ingested into jet engines and causing them to fail. Loss of human life, it must be said, is very rare, although it has occurred: the first recorded victim, apparently, was one Carl Rogers as long ago as 1912, and more recently, a bird-strike crash near Boston 1966 resulted in the deaths of 62 of the 75 aboard an aircraft. Usually, however, such incidents are only fatal for the birds, but the costs involved can be judged from the fact that one bird-strike atone on the French Concorde, an encounter with a flock of geese, cost $6 million in repairs.
About 80 per cent of such events occur in the immediate vicinity of airports. This is partly because during landing and take-off, aircraft are at altitudes where they are most likely to encounter birds in large numbers, and partly because airports are attractive habitats for our avian friends, providing, particularly in wintertime, abundant heat and warmth. Neither are these unwelcome guests very easy to get rid of resident falcons have been tried with only limited success, and more conventional solutions, like periodic bursts of noise, are of only temporary effectiveness; the birds get used to them.
But, as may be obvious, it is a problem with which I am not really too familiar. I shall have to go along tomorrow night to find out more - and you may, too, if that is what you have a mind to do.