Plymouth Airport Bird Control Unit disbands
 

BCU, often the extended eyes of Air Traffic and deemed a Flight safety tool of most Airports, controlling birds and lowering the risk of birdstrike. Must be a good thing then? Not at Plymouth City Airport (UK) as recently the 'birdman' was made redundant due to 'financial' reasons.
With the recent media attention focussed on a birdstrike which resulted in a forced landing on the Hudson river of an airliner, you would think an Airport authority would protect the one asset to help prevent it happening in the UK.....wrong.
The BCU at Plymouth was introduced 12 years ago because of the high number of birdstrikes sustained as the Airport fire service were clearly unable to cope with all the extra duties heaped upon them, bird control being one of them. ATC fought well to keep their BCU but in the end it was to no avail. :ugh:

Bird control has reverted back to the AFS and the birdstrikes are now climbing higher than previous years. 5 probably 6, possibly 7, same period last year 1 possibly 2

Plymouth might be able to write the best procedures in the world, very different thing in being able to carry them out.

and the trouble is.........................this is the easy bit, just wait till August:\

Do tell - what happens in August?:confused: I wasn't aware that birds kept calenders.......:suspect

From what you've said, the BCU duties have transfered from a dedicated unit to the AFS, big deal, the Airport Authority are maintaining their responsibility to provide bird and wildlife control at the airport and you've not provided any evidence at all that the bird problem at Plymouth has deterioated.

Do they still teach the "eagle wing beat" method of alarming our feathered friends? Do people still feel bloody stupid doing it? :}

Eagle wing beat...It does work, I used to amuse my kids years ago by flapping my arms and causing flocks of birds to rise. There is, however, a serious point here; it is often difficult to persuade management that birds are a severe hazard. It is sad that often the only thing to make them see sense is a serious incident. It would be nice to see the best practice espoused at some of our major airports applied at some of the minor ones.

So did one solitary birdman work all hours that the airfield, sorry I mean airport, was open, i.e. circa 16 hours a day, 7 days a week with no public holiday nor annual leave entitlement?

What happened when he wasn't there, did the AFS or ATC covered BCU duties, did birdstrikes only occur when the birdman was off duty and what did he do when he was there?

One could drive around the entire airfield in 10 minutes, I wouldn't believe the size of the field, or the number of movements, would justify a dedicated BCU unit.

Bird Control or short time scaring ?
 

At the recent International Birdstrike Committee meeting held in York last month the expert opinion was that the only form of airport bird control is man himself. That man/woman has to be a dedicated bird control operator and he/she should be on duty during airport opening hours. Part time bird control is not fair on aircrew.

To make RFFS staff dress up in their hot firefighting kit and drive up and down the runway ‘scaring’ birds makes a mockery of flight safety. Birds need to be ‘controlled’ using habitat management, knowledge of behaviour patterns, understanding of flight lines, removal of attractants and clever dispersal techniques not merely scaring.

If you fire a bird scaring cartridge at a flock of starlings you will have four flocks of starlings. If you play a distress tape to a ring necked gull it wont fly away, it will come to the source to investigate and only fly away after you have switched the tape off.

Most RFFS staff consider themselves as highly qualified CAA licenced professionals and do not see bird control as part of their remit. Clever birds will return as soon as the RFFS staff return to the station.

The conundrum is smaller airports are being squeezed and they must find savings or go bankrupt. So does safety come before money ?

Vulcan Lover

Sadly it's not just management, or indeed RFFS, who do not understand the niceties of bird management. A number of years ago I was responsible for a small aerodrome and had an interesting conversation with the regulator. Looking out of the window he asked if we operated a long grass policy to which I replied yes. He then said, " It doesn't work then. What are all those black things I can see? Crows in your long grass." He then suggested I read the Manual of Bird Control at Aerodromes. Rather than prolong the interview I bit my tongue and declined to correct his ornithology, they were rooks. I also chose not to point out that if he read the book he would discover that corvids will, in fact, loaf in long grass.

I would think it to be the commercial passenger-carrying movements that justify a dedicated BCU operator rather than RFFS crew doing bird runs when time allows.

So how do they know when to migrate? Birds exhibit seasonal behaviour, and Merlin69 is obviously well-informed as to how these affect Plymouth operations.

Apart from the figures that Merlin69 has, in fact, provided to demonstrate deteriorating bird control...

I'm finding it difficult to understand why so many people, both on here and in airport boardrooms, are quite happy to allow bird control to be carried out on a part-time basis by people with other jobs. Birds are a real and constant threat to airport movements, and Plymouth has more of a bird threat than many. Bird control is a job needing constant cover by a trained operator. From what I understand, Plymouth had that - now it doesn't. Hardly a demonstration of commitment to flight safety, is it?

Which does sort of prove his point that a long grass policy wasn't working...

the point about long grass (actually a misnomer as it is more of a controlled grass length policy) is that it discourages certain species but not all. It has to be part of an overall habitat management regime and it needs to be backed up by active measures such as the BCU. Had the species which are discouraged by long grass been present I would have agreed that the policy was not working.

I'm not disagreeing with the result of a long grass policy, but the upshot in the case you quote was that, overall, birds were not being discouraged from the airfield, thus the strategy wasn't working. I can't really criticise the CAA for finding fault when there were birds on the airfield not being scared away. ;)

I think you are, perhaps deliberately, missing the point Slowclimber. If the CAA issue a document in which they detail all the various methods of discouraging birds from becoming a hazard and which explains which methods work for which species or groups of species; then I expect their inspectors to understand said document. Not understanding that corvids may not be deterred by long grass is about as ignorant as assuming that playing the herring gull tape on the BABS will have any effect on wood pigeons. The whole point about bird control is that it requires a certain amount of ornithological knowledge. Sadly too many management types think it is sufficient to give someone (usually a fireman) a vehicle, a tape player and a set of crackers and then expect to achieve a bird free environment.

Most CAA inspectors are only interested in the BCU paperwork and a quick view of whats happening in a 30/60 minute time slot. Occasionally you get one that has come from an airfield ops background and has some knowledge but not that many in my experience. Having said that, I don't see that it is necessary for the job they are doing for them to have an extensive ornithological knowledge to carry out the inspection.
Lots of people think they know a lot about bird control on airfields and think it's easy, but, we know better eh??:ok:

Interesting comments on the Safeskys website about the termination of the Plymouth contract:

LINK.

Obviously it is important to recognise Safeskys' commercial interest in the subject but there is a valid point here. One serious birdstrike incident which resulted in the airfield operator being found liable could wipe out years of so called savings on the cost of bird control. That is apart from the potential human cost. I have a healthy suspicion of many of the fads associated with this subject but one thing I am certain of is the hazard which birds can present to aircraft. I have seen too many damaged airframes to feel otherwise.

Having worked on the BCU for 2 years I can honestly say it is a vital cog in safety, a Nimrod went down about one year after I arrived at RAF Kinloss in 1983 due to ingestion of a flock of about 400 seabirds. A New Zealand Air Force pilot on a secondment lost his life, the birds were cleared from the middle of the runway but settled at the end of the runway, the result was they lifted as the aircraft rotated and the aircraft crashed in the Rozelle woods. Keep the birds away, for their sake as much as the human costs, if you think air safety is expensive try an accident.

Airlines now try to recover costs from airports for bird strike damage. Ryan air being just one that will try all means possible. If you cannot prove that you had sufficient bird control measures then the airport will be pursued for any costs incurred, including delays etc.
False economy by any airport to not have full time Bird control.

Well that goes to prove that having a dedicated BCU is no more effective than having the wildlife dispersal done on an irregular basis.
In fact it could be convincingly argued by no fee no win lawyers that the BCU operator at Kinloss contributed to this accident by failing in his professional duties and dispersing the birds from one point, but failing to ensure that they had been dispersed away from the runway and approaches.

Worthy of thought for anyone involved in BCU operations, especially Safeskys and the individual BCU operators in a similar situation - you would both be equally culpable.

A bird control unit can't be everywhere at any one time and unless the operator is omnipresent and precisely because of the above, airport authorities are highly likely to go for the option of not having dedicated BCUs.