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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 1390.PDF
210 FLIGHT International, 8 August 1963 The Navy and the Sandpiper OR, THERE'S A BUCCANEER CLOSE BEHIND YOU STINT the sandpiper had flown down with his family—several hundred of them—from the cold Arctic to the mild sea shores round the British Isles. They were particularly lucky in that they found a sheltered coastline, on the edge of the Moray Firth, washed by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. What was more (and this they considered most remarkable) they discovered, just inland, a large area, several hundred acres in extent, which might have been made for migratory birds from the far North: there were wide stretches of good quality, well-trimmed grass; some distance away, a dump of metal and tyres worth looking into; and long roadway-like stretches of hard ground which were warm to rest on at night (after the paving had absorbed the day's sunshine), when Stint and his family continued probing with their long bills for unconsidered trifles. There was only one snag, they found, to this summer paradise: the great winged shapes which rushed along the runways with an unbearable noise, leaving a blast of hot air behind them. Stint and his friends had to fly out of the way quickly, before regaining their place on the warm surface; and sometimes some of the sand pipers did not fly out of the way quickly enough and the family was reduced in numbers. Tragedy also occurred at times when the sandpipers were flying over the shore area, or further inland, perhaps 500ft above the ground. At one moment several of Stint's brothers and sisters or cousins were there, and at the next they were not: the great winged shape—sometimes white, sometimes grey and white—had come and gone. But the numbers of sandpipers was not affected materially: they continued to enjoy the grass, picking up unconsidered trifles, the warm hard surface at night, and to share with the seagulls the bliss of the long summer days. What is more, they multiplied, and decided to come again next year and to bring their young. The windscreen of the Scimitar mentioned in this article, after a 480kt encounter with something considerably larger than a sandpiper—a vulture, fifing at 3,000ft One day when Stint and some of his closest friends were airborne on a regular foray in search of food—a little further away than usual, this time—they coincided in time and space with one of the great white winged creatures. Stint had never seen the inside of a Gyron Junior engine before, and neither had his friends; though by the time they got inside they were sandpipers no more. Neither, unfortunately, was the Gyron Junior an engine any more. Its intake stuffed with sandpipers and its compressor blades broken, as a powerplant it had suddenly ceased to have any current value except the negative one of providing a young Fleet Air Arm officer, Lt Lowe Byrd-Strike, with an enforced excercise in asym metric flying. The lieutenant got his aircraft down safely, for the Royal Navy are well used to this sort of hazard, with sea- and seashore-birds flying into engines, wings and windscreens, particularly at heights below 1,000ft. There was the usual investigation that follows such an incident: the pilot told his story, the engineer officer Tip tank of a trainer aircraft after a bird strike his; Stint and his brothers and sisters were only passively able to offer any evidence, by the time they had been extracted from the Gyron Junior. The Captain offered his comments and the report went to the Flag Officer. In the Admiralty, where they keep a record of such occurrences, the incident was noted and added to a growing list of bird strikes on aircraft: 20 in 1961, 25 in 1962 and 18 up to the end of June of this year. But apart from compiling some interesting statistics—for example, that 25 per cent of the strikes cause heavy damage and that 85 per cent of them occur below 1,000ft—the Admiralty is no nearer to solving the problem of how to prevent birds flying into aircraft. Several ideas have been tried: in the last war, anti-bird birds, i.e., falcons; more recently, various pyrotechnics including thunderflashes and Very lights—all of which had only a temporary effect upon the bird populations of Naval airfields close to the coast, such as Lossiemouth, where 63 per cent of RN bird strikes occur. Acoustic systems have been tried, broadcasting the calls of birds in distress. These appeared at first to be very effective, but the birds they were designed to deter are now displaying the contempi bred of familiarity. Subsequently a combination of all three- deterrents has been tried—noise, distress calls and flashes; but no permanent deterrent has yet been found, although ideas abound; and the Admiralty are open to suggestions.
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