Boston airport tests radar to avoid bird strikes

BOSTON — Boston Logan International Airport is testing a specialized radar system the Air Force uses to protect its fighters and NASA uses to guard its $2 billion shuttles, as the airport considers stepping up its efforts at preventing collisions between birds and airplanes.

With a wildlife mitigation lineup that already includes five full-time employees, Logan long has had an aggressive bird-strike prevention program. For birds, it is an attractive landing spot, jutting into Boston Harbor and sitting along coastal migratory routes.

Yet when US Airways Flight 1549 splash-landed in New York’s Hudson River after striking a flock of geese, Logan’s operators looked to see whether there was more they could do.

Now they are evaluating the Merlin Avian Radar System, manufactured by DeTect Inc. of Panama City, Fla.

Merlin allows real-time tracking of birds as small as a starling and as far away as nearly five miles. A spinning blade of a horizontal radar provides an airport overview, while a vertical radar scans a specific runway. Birds appear as red dots, with tails indicating their flight path.

“We’re not trying to pinpoint every bird down to a gnat’s eyebrow,” said Gary Andrews, DeTect’s chief executive officer, who demonstrated the radar this week for the Associated Press. “We’re trying to document bird patterns for a successful response.”

A Merlin system is already being used at Durban International Airport in South Africa, the first commercial airport to install avian radar technology. Cost and technical concerns have limited the spread of it and competing technology.

A second Merlin system sits atop a bird-attracting landfill near a runway at the Louisville, Ky., airport, while a system made by a Canadian competitor, Accipiter Radar Technologies Inc., has been installed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport outside Seattle.

Such systems can be automated to alert air traffic controllers of birds entering landing and takeoff corridors, so specific altitudes and travel directions can be relayed to pilots.

They also can archive bird activity, so biologists can analyze it and better predict when to use their low-tech countermeasures such as dogs, sirens or air cannons.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we had some technology to tell us what’s over the horizon?” said David Ishihara, director of aviation operations for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan.

Experts said the challenge is adapting technology designed to track bigger, slower-moving targets such as ships so it can detect faster, biological targets like birds.

“To really further the science, we need a better antenna,” said Matthew Klope, a wildlife biologist who works on bird-strike issues for the Navy at its Whidbey Island Air Station in Washington state.

Bird strikes occur every day at airports worldwide. Most never make the news because aircraft are designed to withstand them.

That was the case Tuesday, when a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 struck a flock of birds while taking off from Baltimore-Washington International Airport en route to Providence, R.I. One engine lost power, but the plane safely turned around and landed.

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