When the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) convenes a public hearing in mid-2009 on a few aspects of the Jan. 15, 2009, ditching of a US Airways Airbus A320 into the Hudson River, attention to digital avian radar likely will be more intense than at any time since 2006. That year, a proposal for civilian-military and public-private collaboration — the North American Bird Strike Advisory System: Strategic Plan (NABSAS) prepared by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the U.S. Air Force and Transport Canada1 — was shelved, and the FAA decided to limit most subsequent avian radar research to performance assessments.
Aspiring to deploy a network of airport avian radars and real-time bird hazard alerting within 10 years, the NABSAS addressed issues that may resurface in the current NTSB investigation. But the plan may have been most prescient in expecting mitigation of bird strike risk to be impeded primarily by human, not avian, factors.
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