Latest news with #airportmanagement
The Guardian
21-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
How do airports try to prevent bird collisions? It's a never-ending job
My tone wavered between enthusiasm and concern. 'Is that a great black-backed gull,' I asked. It was a cold December morning, and I was cruising along the interior roads of Boston's Logan international airport in a white pickup truck. At the wheel was Jeff Turner, who, among other duties, oversees efforts to control wildlife at the airport, including making sure that errant gulls and other birds don't stray into flight paths and cause an accident. He glanced toward the harbor and confirmed that a lone great black-backed was indeed mixed in with a few herring gulls. There is nothing remarkable about spotting this species on the shorelines of Boston. But it sure is fun to gawk at them. They're gluttonous omnivores that will devour rats, rabbits and rotting garbage, and they can be obnoxiously loud and territorial. They're also enormous: the largest of all gull species with wingspans that top out at 5.5ft (1.7 metres), a feathered Goliath that no pilot wants to see perched near a runway. We spent a moment admiring it while commercial flights taxied behind us and roared overhead. 'When you see one sitting next to a herring gull, it's crazy just how much bigger it is,' Turner said. 'Surprisingly, we don't see a lot of black-backed strikes. The majority of our gull strikes are herring gulls.' With that, he parked the truck, walked over to a silver-barreled air cannon set up on a small platform in a patch of grass, and let it rip. The whompfff of the blast made me flinch and sent the gulls scattering. We got back in the truck and rolled onward, looking for more loitering birds to harass. Every day, birds and airplanes collide. The Federal Aviation Administration recorded approximately 19,000 such incidents across nearly 800 US airports in 2023. In total, those strikes cost airlines an estimated $461m. The issue has been in the headlines in recent months following a string of high-profile bird strikes. Korean officials found the remains of Baikal teals in both engines of the Jeju Air flight that crashed in December and killed 179 people (the extent to which the animals contributed to the crash remains under investigation). In February of this year, a hawk obliterated the nose of an Airbus A320 in Brazil. Then in March, a FedEx cargo plane made a fiery emergency landing in Newark, New Jersey, after one of its engines ingested a bird and started spewing flames. Two weeks later, a bird rocketed through the windscreen of a private airplane in California, injuring the passenger and precipitating another emergency landing. Turner's team, which includes five technicians and a contracted United States Department of Agriculture wildlife biologist, is responsible for minimizing the likelihood of such calamities at Logan. They use pyrotechnics and air cannons to scare away birds and do whatever they can to make the landscape as unappealing as possible – be it cutting the grass, draining standing water or ripping up berry-bearing bushes that might attract flocks of peckish blackbirds. When all else fails, the technicians have shotguns in their trucks. 'We always go heavy on harassment,' Turner explained. 'And then the last resort is lethal.' The goal, after all, isn't to kill birds. It's to keep them away from airplanes. That's a daunting task at Logan, where an average of 1,200 flights come and go each day. The airport sprawls across 2,400 acres (971 hectares) with water on three sides. During spring and fall migration, managing birds here is like defending against swarm warfare. 'The fact that we're surrounded by water is a huge challenge … If you're [a bird] flying down the coastline and you see this,' Turner said, gesturing to long stretches of grass on one side and the shallows of Boston harbor on the other, 'it's a whole different habitat.' Turner has worked at Logan since 2010. The most unexpected animal encounter during that time was with a ticked-off otter whose powerful bite left 'five or six holes in my hand', he said. Coyotes make occasional appearances in the winter, as do snowy owls, for which Turner depends on a skilled volunteer who carefully traps and relocates them. On a few occasions, deer have turned up near the runways: 'The most incredible part,' Turner said, is that the deer swam to the airport from the surrounding harbor islands. A breezy conversationalist, Turner's eyes never stopped scanning the perimeter of the airport. He pointed out brants, common eiders, a merlin, and bucket loads of gulls. As we drove on, we saw Canada geese congregating near the water and a few dozen European starlings zipping around further inland. Canada geese are famously associated with bird strikes thanks to the heroics of Capt Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger, who in January 2009 safely landed an Airbus A320 on the Hudson river after hitting a flock of geese in what's been dubbed the 'Miracle on the Hudson'. But European starlings can be every bit as dangerous. 'They just undulate everywhere and when you harass them they split and come back together,' Turner said. Starling murmurations are such a threat that Turner's team erected a trap made of wood and chicken wire with a one-way entry point at the top and food and water below. Pity the technicians who have to 'dispatch' the trapped birds by snapping their necks. If that sounds grim, it may help to consider the tragic history of European starlings at Logan. For several years prior to meeting Turner, I had been researching a book on Roxie Laybourne, a scientist who pioneered the field of forensic ornithology while working at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Her career took an unusual turn on 4 October 1960, when a flight taking off from Logan hit an enormous flock of birds and crashed into the water, killing 62 people. It was unprecedented and terrifying. Investigators needed to know the type of bird that caused the crash, so they sent some of the remains down to the Smithsonian. Laybourne and her boss sorted through the pieces and found enough feathers to confirm that starlings were to blame. In the following years, bird strikes caused more fatal airplane crashes: in 1962, tundra swans downed a commercial flight over Maryland, killing all 17 people on board; and in 1964, astronaut Theodore Freeman died after his training jet careened into a flock of snow geese near Houston. To establish new safety standards, engineers and regulators needed to know what types of birds were being hit most frequently and how much those birds weighed, so they turned to Laybourne for help. Using her microscope and the Smithsonian's vast collection of research specimens, she developed ways of identifying birds by analyzing the microscopic structures of feathers. She went on to apply her skills to criminal investigations, including murder and poaching cases, but more than anything focused on aviation, identifying the remains of more than 10,000 airplane-struck birds. Nowadays, most airlines voluntarily report bird strikes and send the splattered animal bits they recover to the Smithsonian's Feather Identification Lab, run by Carla Dove, who trained under Laybourne. The lab works with the FAA, the US air force and the US navy, and identified more than 11,000 bird-strike remains last year, dozens of which of which were collected in Boston. Most bird strikes cause no damage whatsoever. But every once in a while, things go awfully wrong and that's what keeps Turner on his toes. His job is a never-ending, always-evolving risk-benefit analysis in which mundane tasks such as trimming the grass can be a catch-22. Whenever the mowers go out in the summer, he explained, huge amounts of barn swallows come swooping in for the buffet of insects that get kicked up in the process. 'We don't want the bird strikes, but we gotta cut the grass,' he added, playing up the damned-if-you-do nature of it all. In this line of work, even the most well-intentioned actions can have undesirable consequences. He offered up the example of Boston harbor, once one of the most polluted harbors in the country. After decades of clean-up efforts and programs to reduce sewage overflows, the water is swimmable and it's a legitimate environmental success story. While Turner loves seeing such progress, the wildlife manager in him laments the fact that better water quality means more productive shellfish beds, which in turn means more gulls. 'The gulls have adapted to it,' he said, pointing to shards of oyster shells on the side of the road. 'They're taking them out at low tide, dropping them on the pavement or on the runways, and cracking the shells open to have a nice little feast. It's a pain.' With air traffic increasing at Logan and pretty much everywhere else, Turner is a realist who knows that bird strikes are a problem that cannot be stopped, only mitigated. 'It's inevitable that something's going to happen,' he said. 'And we just do everything we can do to make sure it's not going to be one of those catastrophic strikes.' Chris Sweeney is the author of The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne, coming 22 July from Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Zawya
16-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Oman Airports signs agreement with Singapore's Changi Airport to boost revenues
Muscat: Oman Airports Management Company signed on Wednesday an agreement with Changi Airport in the Republic of Singapore to boost the commercial and aviation revenues of airports across the Sultanate of Oman. The signing ceremony was attended by Eng. Saeed bin Hamoud al Maawali, Minister of Transport, Communications and Information Technology; and Chairman of Oman Airports' Board of Directors. The agreement was signed by Eng. Ahmed bin Said Al-Amri, CEO of Oman Airports, and Mr. Eugene Gan, CEO of Changi Airport. Eng. Ahmed bin Said Al-Amri, CEO of Oman Airports, stated that the agreement aims to enhance the commercial and operational revenues of the airports in the Sultanate. He emphasized that Oman Airports is proactively working to increase operational income by reducing costs, driving transformative changes in revenue streams, and improving airport performance. 2022 © All right reserved for Oman Establishment for Press, Publication and Advertising (OEPPA) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
BBC News
17-06-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Leeds Bradford Airport's £100m extension opens to passengers
A long-awaited extension to Leeds Bradford Airport's (LBA) terminal building has been opened to £100m project is the largest investment yet in facilities at the airport and increased space in customer areas by about 40%, LBA new boarding gates have been added to the airport along with a new immigration area, baggage collection hall, food and drink outlets and an 83% boost in chief executive officer Vincent Hodder said it was the "first major improvement to our terminal since its opening in 1968 and is long overdue". Details of the privately funded project were first announced in 2018, but were quickly eclipsed by a more ambitious plan to build a brand new terminal at the south end of the bosses scrapped that scheme in 2022 because of "excessive delays" and a decision to hold a public inquiry into the development, with building on the extension starting in 2023. Work on the next stage of the airport's reconfiguration will begin later this year, with a full refurbishment of the existing terminal and a new security if a terminal extension meant there would be more flights, Mr Hodder said: "By the time we get to the 2030s and 2040s we would certainly expect to be exceeding the capacity of this terminal."That will require another wave of investment to increase the scope of the airport and meet the needs of Yorkshire."He added: "It's vitally important to upgrade LBA to the world-class facility Yorkshire deserves."The airport said the terminal extension and redevelopment of the original buildings had the potential to create 1,500 direct jobs at LBA and 4,000 indirect jobs by 2030. Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Zawya
16-06-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Egypt: Madbouly, IFC Managing Director discusses airport management plans, private sector projects
Arab Finance: Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly met with Makhtar Diop, Managing Director of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and his accompanying delegation to discuss ongoing cooperation and explore new opportunities for private sector engagement, particularly in the management and operation of Egyptian airports, as per a statement. On the sidelines of the 'Development Financing to Empower the Private Sector' conference held in Egypt's New Administrative Capital, Madbouly expressed appreciation for the strategic partnership between the Egyptian government and the IFC, particularly the corporation's advisory role in the government's asset offering program. He praised the IFC's continued cooperation with Egypt and reaffirmed his commitment to deepening this collaboration in the period ahead. The Prime Minister highlighted the ongoing cooperation with the IFC in offering several Egyptian airports for management and operation by internationally specialized private companies. He emphasized the significance of this step, noting that Egypt plans to announce the first batch of airports to be offered for private management before the end of the year. This marks the first time Egyptian airports will be operated by experienced private-sector entities with proven global track records. Madbouly called for the swift announcement of the full plan to offer airport management contracts to accelerate the selection process for qualified companies. For his part, Diop thanked Madbouly for his support and commended the role of the Ministry of Planning in facilitating IFC's activities in Egypt. Diop announced that the strategy for offering Egyptian airports for private management will be revealed soon, after which tendering procedures will begin, starting with the selection of a specialized company to manage and operate Hurghada Airport. He also expressed interest in expanding cooperation with the Egyptian government across additional sectors, including tourism, specifically medical, beach, and cultural tourism. It is noteworthy that Diop is visiting Egypt from June 15th to 16th to reaffirm the institution's commitment to supporting the country's economic development by enhancing private sector participation. © 2020-2023 Arab Finance For Information Technology. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
Zawya
16-06-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Egypt to launch first airport management, operation tenders before year-end: PM
Egypt - Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced on Sunday that Egypt will offer its first airports for private management and operation before the end of the year, marking a major step in the country's privatization drive. The announcement came during a meeting with Makhtar Diop, Managing Director of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), held on the sidelines of the 'Development Finance to Foster Private Sector-Led Growth & Jobs' conference in the New Administrative Capital. Madbouly expressed appreciation for the ongoing partnership between the Egyptian government and the IFC, which acts as a strategic advisor to Egypt's privatization program. He praised the IFC's contributions across various sectors and reaffirmed the government's commitment to deepening this collaboration. Highlighting the IFC's global experience in airport concessions, Madbouly said the government is keen to accelerate the timeline for launching Egypt's airport management and operation tenders. He described the upcoming offering as a landmark event, noting it will be the first time Egyptian airports are managed and operated by specialized private companies with international expertise. Makhtar Diop confirmed that a detailed strategy for the airport initiative would be released soon, starting with a tender for the management and operation of Hurghada Airport. He also emphasized the IFC's commitment to expanding cooperation with Egypt in several sectors, including tourism—particularly medical, beach, cultural, and therapeutic tourism. Minister of Planning and Economic Development Rania Al-Mashat added that Prime Minister Madbouly closely monitors the IFC's activities in Egypt. She noted that the next phase will focus on launching a comprehensive promotional campaign—both locally and internationally—to support the airport management initiative. The campaign will spotlight global success stories of private-sector-led airport operations to attract experienced international operators. © 2024 Daily News Egypt. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
