In August, a Ural Airlines Airbus A321 operating a scheduled domestic flight in Russia was forced to land in a field shortly after takeoff after a double bird strike and engine failure while the airplane was in its initial climb. Of the 223 passengers and seven crew on board, only 10 passengers were injured, but it could have been worse.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), through an interagency agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), compiles a database of reported wildlife strikes. The database, which covers January 1990 through September 2019, includes strikes to U.S. civil aircraft and to foreign carriers that suffer strikes in the United States, and includes data collected from 2,050 U.S. airports and more than 300 airports outside the country.
A sampling of the data labeled as “some significant wildlife strikes to civil aircraft in the United States” stretches to 179 pages. The entire database currently numbers about 220,000 strike reports, includin…
