Navy Airfield Seeks to Make Skies Friendlier for Birds, Planes

It was a $70-million plane, but all it took to bring it down were a couple of ducks.

The high-tech E2-C Hawkeye, designed to detect missile threats, was practicing touch-and-goes on Ventura County’s Point Mugu naval air base when it hit two projectiles in the night sky.

The birds were sucked into its engines. The stalled plane dipped and glided about 9,000 feet before thumping down into a field at the end of the runway.

The three aviators were unharmed, but the plane was destroyed. All that remained of the ducks were a few feathers.

Since that day about a year ago, Point Mugu, a base built on wetlands and home to five endangered bird species, has been focusing more attention on its avian residents.

A newly hired base employee will work full time on preventing bird strikes. And a new high-tech radar system, one of only two on Navy bases, will be installed later this summer to keep track of birds.

Built on the edge of the Pacific, Point Mugu is particularly susceptible to bird strikes. Compounding the problem are environmental laws protecting a wide range of bird species and technology making jets increasingly faster and quieter.

The bird-strike industry is booming across the country, not just at Point Mugu.

There are conventions devoted to its discussion, biologists who specialize in the subject and new technologies popping up that can pit pilots against conservationists.

“It used to be an act of God,” said Richard Dolbeer, who heads a U.S. Department of Agriculture wildlife research center in Sandusky, Ohio. “But, increasingly, airline companies are asking, ‘What are you doing to minimize bird hazards?’ ”

Los Angeles International Airport has a wildlife expert on staff. At Camarillo Airport, operators deal with the bird problem by keeping the rodent problem down, discouraging hawks and other raptors.

The Federal Aviation Administration has set up a Web site devoted to tracking strike incidents. At John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, which is also built on marshland, the base has courted controversy by regularly shooting gulls.

The Air Force, the first in the country to address bird strikes, began a prevention program 20 years ago with a particularly evocative name: BASH, shorthand for Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard.

In the civilian world, organized discussions began taking place a decade ago.

A group of municipal civilian airports had its first convention in 1991 with 11 participants. Last year, in Minnesota, a conference drew 370.

Though still rare, bird strikes can be frightening, and sometimes tragic. Last year, an Amsterdam-bound KLM jumbo jet with 429 passengers blew an engine after hitting a flock of birds and was forced to make an emergency landing at LAX. In 1995, 24 crew members at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska died when an AWACS surveillance plane exploded in a fireball after sucking in several geese.

The odds of such accidents have only increased in recent years, Dolbeer said. With more focus on wildlife conservation--including the elimination of poisonous DDT and the set-aside of millions of acres of nature preserves--there has been a corresponding growth in many bird species.

About 90% of birds hit by planes are protected by an agreement among Mexico, Canada and the United States, Dolbeer said. That means airports can’t destroy nests or indiscriminately shoot migrating birds without going through a regulatory process.

The problem is exacerbated by an increase in general aviation. Planes are taking off much faster and quieter in response to complaints from airport neighbors. Consequently, there are more planes in the air, and they’re less detectable to birds.

“It’s like creating good habitat for birds in the middle of an interstate highway,” Dolbeer said.

And it’s the perfect situation for a growing industry.

“We’ve got more birds and we have more airplanes and more lawyers,” Dolbeer said.

Experts estimate there are about five strikes for every 10,000 takeoffs and landings worldwide, and the majority of them cause little or no damage. Of 24,429 strikes in the 1990s, about 6% caused substantial damage, according to FAA figures. About 400 people have been killed and 420 aircraft destroyed since the beginning of flight as a result of bird strikes, Dolbeer said.

Airports and Air Force bases have employed peregrine falcons or dogs to chase birds away. Others use loud booms, and some attempt to move birds to new habitats. Some have even considered draining wetlands.

Some of those methods make biologists nervous--especially in an ecologically sensitive area like Point Mugu, a site renowned for bird-watching.

“The numbers of birds there are are just staggering,” said Dan Cooper, an Audubon Society biologist. “It’s probably as high a concentration in an area that size as anywhere in the state.”

Many conservationists argue that bird strikes are another symptom of increasing human encroachment on wildlife and their environment. Some conservationists fear that the Navy might consider draining wetlands to solve the problem, but Navy officials say that is not a plan.

Point Mugu officials said they want to take necessary precautions while being good environmental stewards.

“The continuing emphasis to protect more and more makes operating difficult. We work around seasonal migrations,” said Capt. Mark Swaney, the commanding officer of the Naval Air Warfare Center, the base’s largest tenant.

As the base’s natural resources manager, Tom Keeney is the bird man. He studies the listed species on base, works on habitat issues and shovels up the road kill that draws the big birds to the runway.

Roaming around the base in a beat-up truck, Keeney keeps up a regular chatter with the flight tower, letting it know when he sees a flock of sparrows dive across the strip or a turkey vulture overhead.

As he drives around the base, he also has another job: studying, and attempting to revive, the populations of endangered birds that linger around Mugu Lagoon.

The listed species are not much of a problem on the runway. They are beach birds. But other species--turkey vultures, killdeer, waterfowl from the duck club just over the base fence--don’t pay much attention to base boundaries.

The turkey vultures, which perch on rooftops of base housing, surf air currents over the runway. Keeney had to place a cluster of pinwheel-like whirligigs atop one building near the flight line to keep them from roosting there.

On a recent drive around the base, he came across a group of the vultures hunched over a freshly killed jack rabbit on a road parallel to the runway. He stopped, pulled a shovel from the back of his truck and scraped the rabbit into a drainage ditch.

“That’s what you don’t want,” he said.

Keeney uses basic methods to keep his runway bird-free. The grass is kept short to keep out rodents, nesting birds and other birds that hide in brush.

A new radar system to be installed next month will provide night-flying pilots with helpful information. Everything from insects to birds will show up in blips on a screen; the faster the blip, the smaller the object.

But human vigilance remains the key when it’s man versus bird.

“You just gotta try to outsmart these birds,” Keeney said. “You have to start thinking like a bird.”