Simulating the Risk of Bird Strikes

This paper presents a fast-time simulation environment for assessing the risk of bird strikes in aviation. An existing air traffic simulator was enhanced in order to simulate air and bird traffic simultaneously and to recognize collisions between birds and aircraft. Furthermore, a method was developed to generate bird movement information from different radar sources. The resulting set-up represents the first simulation environment to perform fast-time simulations including air traffic and bird movements. A verification with real data revealed that approximately thrice as many bird strikes occur in the simulation as in reality. When considering bird reaction to approaching aircraft, which is not covered in the simulation as well as unreported strikes, this implies an adequate result. For this reason, the simulator can serve as valuable tool to analyse the risk of bird strikes and to evaluate new Air Traffic Management concepts to reduce the number of these events.