An American Airlines flight in Columbus had to make an emergency landing after a bird strike caused an engine fire over the weekend. Flight 1958, which was headed from Columbus to Phoenix, safely returned to John Glenn Columbus International Airport after the strike. No one was injured in the incident.
Syed A.M. Shihab, Ph.D., assistant professor in Kent State's College of Aeronautics and Engineering, shared his insight on bird strikes in a previous article, “What’s the Big Idea? Birds and Drones.”
Shihab established that bird strikes are simply collisions between birds and aircraft. When it comes to preventing these unfortunate incidents, it lies in technology and studying bird movement.
“Now sadly, bird strikes have resulted in many non-fatal and fatal accidents in aviation since its beginning. So, we need to minimize the risk of bird strikes,” Shihab said. “One way we can do this is by modeling and predicting the bird movement using cutting edge AI and machine learning models based on the bird movement data collected using avian and weather radars.”
Check out the “What’s The Big Idea?” featuring Shihab.