Originally Posted by
UltraFan
I don't know the answer to those but here are my 2 cents, for what it's worth. The United 1549 hit at least one goose with each engine. That's roughly 5 kilos of bird per donk. The Ural Airlines 178 hit seagulls. I don't know what happened to the right engine, but I counted seven birds injested by the left one. That's anywhere between 5 and 10 kilograms of meat. And that's, in purely technical terms, A LOT.
If we change the certification requirements, which bird do we take for reference? Swans can weigh over 20 kilos. Even a regular wild turkey has been known to grow to 25-30 kilos. And those are just regular birds that can be found anywhere in the world in big numbers. Then the size of the bird matters. Condors and albatroses have wingspan comparable to light aircraft. How do we provide for that?
I just read someone say there is a huge landfil near ZIA - a feasting spot for all local birds. No idea if it's true, but if it is, maybe there lies the solution.
And it would be extremely difficult or more like impossible to apply statistics to this, with only two of these events and both different, in fact I imagine identical bird strikes would be rare. You would have to compare equivalent forces, the bird strikes would need to have hit both engines while taking off. This is where statistics can be dangerous tools in the wrong hands.
You can't differentiate these events from chance, not even with Poisson process, which really isn't applicable to this in my opinion.