A record 14,496 collisions between aircraft and wildlife, especially birds, were reported in the United States in 2017, a 7 percent increase from 2016, according to the most recent wildlife strike report from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).1The agencies’ Wildlife Strikes to Civil Aircraft in the United States, 1990–2017 says that the total includes strikes recorded in the United States and strikes involving U.S. aircraft in foreign countries (which accounted for less than 2 percent of the total). As is typical, 95 percent of the reported strikes involved birds, with the rest divided between bats in flight, and terrestrial mammals and reptiles on the ground.
Despite the overall increase in reported strikes, the number of damage-pr…
