Here is a piece of research that people might find interesting.
It basically is a summary of the effectiveness of aircraft lighting to avoid bird strikes.
A new study may have important implications for reducing bird-aircraft collisions through the customization of aircraft and runway lights to birds’ visual systems. Birds’ eyes are different from human eyes in several key ways, and researchers determined that blue light would be most conspicuous to the Brown-headed Cowbirds used in their study. Outfitting a remote-controlled model airplane with lights in this color, they tested how the captive flock reacted to continuous versus pulsing lights and to a stationary versus approaching aircraft. When the aircraft was stationary, cowbirds became alert more quickly when the lights were on than when they were off. When the aircraft approached the birds with lights off, their response times slowed as the aircraft’s speed increased, but lights helped mitigate this effect.
I’d like to see a control with ordinary lights.
And data on the effect on pilots of blue landing lights.
And data from some other bird species.
When I encountered a very large buzzard at 1500’ over my home village recently, he or she actually turned toward me before breaking off and passing 30 – 50’ away. I had strobes on, which are the blue end of white. I fancy the bird heard me rather than saw me coming and there’s no way to know if the strobes made any difference. Never mind, it will soon be quadcopters coming through the windscreen instead, much less messy (for the birds).
I’d like to see it compared with the ‘wig-wag’ landing lights too… There is a lot of marketing noise about that, but little factual data it seems.
New study anyone?
