The suspected cause of the plane crash in South Korea is a collision with birds, according to authorities. This is the most serious aviation accident in the country's history: 179 people died on Sunday, December 29, after a Boeing 737-800 from a low-cost airline hit a wall and burst into flames. 'landing.
Since 1988, bird strikes have caused 262 human deaths and destroyed 250 aircraft worldwide, according to a specialist task force set up by Australian Civil Aviation. These collisions with birds are therefore taken very seriously, particularly in France, where each airport has scarers.
In France, numerous collisions take place between wild animals and planes. There will be 905 of them in 2023, according to the latest report from the DGAC, the General Directorate of Civil Aviation. Among these collisions, 56 are said to be “serious“, that is to say they caused damage to the structure or engines of the aircraft and/or impacts on aviation safety or on the continuation of the flight.
The statistics are relentless: these collisions mainly take place during takeoff and landing at fairly low altitudes, between 0 and 50 feet, or 15 meters. Mid-air collisions are much rarer, but they are not impossible. In 2021, a tourist plane crashed in the Seine-et-Marne department, after hitting a cormorant in flight. Most collisions are caused by birds of prey.
To avoid disasters, all French airports have “animal hazard prevention officers”. In the Paris region, there are around thirty of them and they operate every day, from sunrise to nightfall, as provided for by airport regulations.
Several means are used to scare away the birds, such as pyrotechnics, lasers but above all fixed loudspeakers near the runways and ground personnel in equipped vehicles.
The agents all have a hunting license, explains Aymeric Staub, spokesperson for the Côte d'Azur airports, “which means that they are perfectly competent and able to recognize birds, even from a distance, to know exactly what type of birds they are, what their predators would be in order to be able to scare them away, what are, above all, their behavior and their dangerousness So there is, first and foremost, the sound scarer: they have a kind of computer in their vehicle which lists the cries of a certain number of natural predators And depending on the birds. that he you have to scare away, they are activating this sound device”specifies the spokesperson stationed in Nice for 6 years.
Aymeric Staub specifies: “They can also use pyrotechnic elements which, again, allow animals to flee without harming them. As a last resort, they are authorized to use lethal weapons. But it is a last resort and it is extremely, extremely rare, since I worked at Nice-Côte d'Azur airport, this has never happened”specifies the spokesperson stationed in Nice for 6 years. Nantes is the only civil French airport to have its own falconry which includes three scarers and three buzzards whose missions are to scare away birds.
