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As one of the busiest airports in East China, effective bird-strike prevention is of paramount importance for Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport. Ground-dwelling insects in airport grasslands serve as a critical food source for insectivorous birds, making the study of insect communities essential for understanding bird activity patterns and mitigating bird-strike risks from a food chain perspective. This study investigates the communities of insects, birds, and vegetation in the flight zone and clear zone of Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport. Based on monthly surveys conducted from January to December 2024, we analyzed insect community composition and diversity, assessed bird-strike risks, and examined correlations between insect and bird communities. The results recorded a total of 7744 birds belonging to 107 species, 43 families, and 15 orders in the flight zone and clear zone. Passeriformes was the most species-rich order, and resident birds dominated the avian community. Bird species richness and abundance peaked in spring and autumn. In the flight zone, 18 bird species (e.g., Hirundo rustica) were classified as highly hazardous (R ≥ 15, where R is the calculated risk index) or above. The vegetation survey identified Cynodon dactylon as the dominant plant species in the flight zone. Importantly, positive trends were observed between insectivorous birds and insect abundance, though correlations did not reach statistical significance. To reduce food availability for birds, we recommend stringent management of the grassland habitat in the flight zone, including targeted insect control measures. Given the airport’s location along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, enhanced bird dispersal efforts should be implemented during peak migration seasons. This study provides a crucial ecological foundation for developing an integrated “vegetation–insect–bird” management strategy for bird-strike prevention at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport and similar aviation hubs.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) promises to reduce ground traffic and journey times by using electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for short, low-altitude flights, especially in urban environments. However, low-flying aircraft are at particularly high risk of collisions with wildlife, such as birds. This study builds on previous research into UAM collision avoidance systems (UAM-CAS) by implementing one such system in the BlueSky open-source air traffic simulator and evaluating its efficacy in reducing bird strikes. Several modifications were made to the original UAM-CAS framework to improve performance. Realistic UAM flight plans were developed and combined with real-world bird movement datasets representing typical birds in sustained flight from all seasons, recorded by an avian radar at Leeuwarden Air Base. Fast-time simulations were conducted in the BlueSky Open Air Traffic Simulator using the UAM flight plan, the bird datasets, and the UAM-CAS algorithm. Results demonstrated that, under modelling assumptions, the UAM-CAS reduced bird strikes by 62%, with an average delay per flight of 15 s, whereas 27% of the remaining strikes occurred with birds outside the system’s design scope. A small number of flights faced substantially longer delays, indicating some operational impacts. Based on the findings, specific avenues for future research to improve UAM-CAS performance are suggested.

Ubiquitous Radar has become an essential tool for preventing bird strikes at airports, where accurate target classification is of paramount importance. The working mode of Ubiquitous Radar, which operates in track-then-identify (TTI) mode, provides both tracking information and Doppler information for the classification and recognition module. Moreover, the main features of the target’s Doppler information are concentrated around the Doppler main spectrum. This study innovatively used tracking information to generate a feature enhancement layer that can indicate the area where the main spectrum is located and combines it with the RGB three-channel Doppler spectrogram to form an RGBA four-channel Doppler spectrogram. Compared with the RGB three-channel Doppler spectrogram, this method increases the classification accuracy for four types of targets (ships, birds, flapping birds, and bird flocks) from 93.13% to 97.13%, an improvement of 4%. On this basis, this study integrated the coordinate attention (CA) module into the building block of the 34-layer residual network (ResNet34), forming ResNet34_CA. This integration enables the network to focus more on the main spectrum information of the target, thereby further improving the classification accuracy from 97.13% to 97.22%.

In order to comprehensively evaluate the risk of bird strike at airports and effectively prevent the occurrence of bird strike events, this paper constructs the risk assessment index system of airport bird strike from five perspectives of “personnel-bird-equipment-environment-management”. For the purpose of maximizing variances, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the entropy weight method are combined and used to obtain the comprehensive weights. The five-element connection number of Set Pair Analysis (SPA) is introduced to establish the identical-discrepancy-contrary airport bird strike risk assessment model, and the risk trend is analyzed according to the partial connection number for each order. The experiment results show that the combined weighting method can minimize the weight deviation and demonstrate good accuracy in determining the weights of indicators at all levels. The established airport bird strike risk assessment model can reasonably predict the risk trend, which is significant for airport personnel to carry out bird strike prevention works.

Bird strikes pose one of the most significant threats to aviation safety, often leading to substantial loss of life and economic damage. Many bird strike incidents involve multiple birds. However, in previous bird strike studies, the problem of multiple bird strikes has often been neglected. In this paper, the bird slicing process of a rotating engine fan is examined, and a probability model is introduced to assess the risk of multiple impacts on the fan blades. In addition, this paper utilized an implicit–explicit calculation method. The parameters of blade root stress, tip displacement, plastic deformation, and energy were selected to investigate the effects of the time interval and strike position of a bird strike on the dynamic response of and damage to the blades. The results indicated that the position of bird strikes has a more pronounced effect on blade damage compared to the time interval between impacts. Damage to a blade is most severe when the blade root is struck multiple times. Multiple bird strikes may not always lead to a significant increase in maximum blade tip displacement, and may even have a dampening effect.

Birds in airport airspaces are critical threats to aviation safety. Avian radar systems are effective for long-range bird monitoring and hazard warning, but their functionalities are confined to a short-term temporal scale. Spatial–temporal activity modeling and characterization for birds are not studied comprehensively from historical radar datasets. This paper proposes a radar data analysis framework to characterize bird activities as a long-term functionality complement. Spatial domain modeling initializes data mining by extracting reference spots for data filtering. Bird activities are quantified in the temporal domain. Activity degrees are utilized for periodicity extraction with the daily segment random permutation strategy. Categorical probabilities are calculated to interpret bird activity periodicity characters. Historical radar datasets collected from an avian radar system are adopted for validation. The extracted activity periodicity trends for diurnal birds present prominent consistency with artificial observation records. Migratory bird periodicity trends present a good match with ornithology understandings. A preliminary experiment is presented to indicate the possibility of predicting bird activity levels, especially for migratory birds.

Collisions between wildlife and aircraft are a major safety concern for international aviation. In the Americas, vultures (Cathartidae) are considered to be one of the most hazardous bird species to airport operations. In this study, we evaluated the use of translocations as a management technique to reduce vulture abundance near the Manaus International Airport (MAO), Manaus, Brazil. The MAO is one of the busiest and most strategically important airports in South America, often referred to as the gateway to the Brazilian Amazon. We captured, wing-tagged, and translocated 98 vultures between August and October 2013 and between January and April 2014. The wing-tags were colored plastic tags specifically developed to tag vultures to enhance identification in flight and not alter bird behavior. The tagged vultures were translocated different distances (100, 150, and 200 km) from MAO. Only 25.5% of translocated vultures returned to the airport. However, the relative abundance of vultures did not differ between monitoring periods before and after captures and translocations. Our results demonstrated that the translocations failed to decrease MAO vulture abundance. We recommend habitat modifications associated with nonlethal (dispersion by bird repellents) and lethal (kill some individuals reinforcing dispersion) strategies to reduce vulture bird strike risks.

Background Wildlife collisions, especially bird strikes, pose a persistent threat to aviation safety. Identifying the species involved and understanding their ecological patterns are essential for effective risk mitigation. This study investigated wildlife strike incidents involving civil aircraft at Shanghai Pudong International Airport from 2014 to 2024, with a focus on species composition, migratory status, and seasonal variation based on molecular identification. Results A total of 1760 wildlife strike incidents were analyzed, of which 1397 samples were birds, 260 were mammals, 5 were other animals, and 98 samples could not be reliably identified. Molecular identification revealed 208 bird species associated with strike events. Migratory birds dominated strike risk, accounting for 1181 incidents (84.54%), whereas permanent resident species contributed only 216 incidents (15.46%). Among the ten most frequently recorded bird species, eight were migratory and only two were permanent residents. Clear seasonal patterns were observed, with species richness peaking in autumn and species diversity and evenness highest in spring, corresponding to major migration periods. In addition, several endangered and vulnerable bird species were identified among strike records, highlighting potential conservation concerns. Conclusion Bird strike risk at Shanghai Pudong International Airport is primarily driven by migratory bird species, particularly during peak migration seasons. Although birds constitute the main hazard, the occurrence of mammal strikes, especially involving bats, requires greater attention in airport wildlife management. These findings emphasize the need for seasonally adaptive and migration-focused mitigation strategies and demonstrate the value of molecular identification for improving wildlife strike risk assessment and management at civil airports.

Involving air traffic controllers and pilots into the bird strike prevention process is considered an essential step to increase aviation and avian safety. Prior to implementing operational measures such as real-time warning systems, it is vital to evaluate their feasibility. This paper studies the efficacy of a bird strike advisory system for air traffic control. In addition to the potential safety benefit, the possible impact on airport operations is analyzed. To this end, a previously developed collision avoidance algorithm underlying the system was tested in fast-time Monte Carlo simulations involving various air traffic and bird densities to obtain representative conclusions for different operational conditions. The results demonstrate the strong safety potential of operational bird strike prevention in case of precise bird movement prediction. Unless airports operate close to their capacity limits while bird abundance is high, the induced delays remain tolerable. Prioritization of hazardous strikes involving large individuals as well as flocks of birds are expected to support operational feasibility in all conditions.

The bird-strike is the main reason that could lead to the severe damages to the aircraft and the cost. In addition, aviation certification authorities have to prove the integrity of bird strike. The verification method for bird-strike is not by the test to evaluate at the early design phase but, by the analytical method. In this paper, birds were idealized as fluid to evaluate the analytical assessment and the SPH method and effect analysis research were applied using commercial analyzing instrument, Abaqus. The SPH method has an advantage of reducing element deformation and analyzing time much more than the previous ALE or Lagrangian methods. In order to verify the bird-strike analysis, the structures with rigid body structures having infinite stiffness were analyzed and the effectiveness of bird-strike applied the SPH method confirmed by comparison of the analysis value with experiment value. In addition, as for the airworthiness requirements on modified aircraft, the maximum speed of aircraft was 8000 lbs., assuming the flight path was the same as birds, and conducted analysis of the bird-strike on the radome and the structure supporting the radome based on the additional installation of satellite antenna on the existing aircraft in order to verify the design ensuring the continuous safe flight and landing of the aircraft once striking with 4 lbs. of birds, as a result, it was confirmed that the structural stability of antenna structures and radome after modification was secured based on the analysis result of SPH method on the bird-strike. This analysis on the bird-strike can present the optimum design for the radome prior to the mock-up test and it allows to reduce the cost and time of the development.