Evaluating the Effects of a Bird Strike Advisory System

Bird strikes have operational impacts and cause economic loss to the aviation industry. In the worst case, the damages resulting from bird strikes lead to crashes. The highest risk for bird strikes is in the area below 3000 ft and thus mainly in airport environments. Despite intense efforts from the airports in controlling the local bird populations, the number of bird strikes in these environments is still very high. Usually, Air Traffic Control is neither integrated into the process for reducing bird strikes nor do the controllers receive any precise information about the current bird traffic situation at the airport. For the project described in this paper, we assume a different situation: Air Traffic Control is provided with a tool informing the controller about the current and predicted bird traffic at the airport. Based on this information, the controller can decide to delay departing air traffic in order to avoid potential collisions between birds and the aircraft taking off. When implementing this procedure at an airport, we expect an increase in airport safety and, due to the delaying of traffic, a reduction in runway capacity. We hypothesize, that the Relations between the settings of the alerting systems and the effects on safety and capacity are deterministic. To test this hypothesis, we will perform fast-time simulations under varying conditions. This paper describes the simulation environment created for this purpose