It had the pleasure to co-author a technical briefing and share the stage in Cleveland, OH on August 4, 2026 with bird strike expert Dr. Richard Dolbeer at the 2026 U.S. Aviation Wildlife Management Conference.
Dr. Dolbeer issued the call to the aviation industry to focus on reducing off-airport damaging bird strikes in the critical approach and departure corridors which now are running at twice the rate as on-airport damaging strikes.
As our paper points out and which Dr. Dolbeer and I encourage aviation stakeholders to read, this requires a paradigm shift from managing the birds to “managing the aircraft”. And managing the aircraft requires ATC, pilots and airlines getting the strategic and tactical, bird-congestion decision support they need by radio and at their fingertips, derived from 3D avian radar that tracks the birds in real-time in those critical flight corridors.
Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch here. Our paper reports on work I led almost 15 years ago following the U.S. Airways 1549 Miracle on the Hudson with ATC, pilots, and airlines that resulted in a framework and concept of operations associated with developing and delivering strategic and tactical, data flows directly to ATC, pilots and airlines who are able to mitigate the risk of such damaging strikes through situational understanding and changes in (i) flight planning, (ii) approach and departure profiles, and (iii) holding patterns.
Accipiter Radar is committed to helping the aviation industry solve this off-airport airspace deconfliction problem, just like we did with the industry beginning in 2004 to pioneer avian radar for on-airport wildlife management resulting in Federal Aviation Administration Advisory Circular 150/5220-25. In our paper, we propose to lead an inexpensive, 12-month proof-of-concept study involving multiple North American airports, each with a local working group including ATC, pilots and airlines who will collaborate on defining the necessary, radar-derived, strategic and tactical decision support data they believe they could use to succhttps://www.linkedin.com/feed/https://www.linkedin.com/feed/essfully mitigate off-airport bird-strike risk. We will share our findings with the aviation industry to serve as a concrete starting point that enables all aviation stakeholders to get their heads around what a solution could look like, which is critical to accelerate the industry development and standardization of these new, off-airport airspace deconfliction capabilities.
If you or your airport are interested in joining us in this aviation safety effort, please reach out to Dr. Tim J. Nohara at tnohara@accipiterradar.com .
Bird strikes during climb and approach: a need for radar-based management strategies involving multiple stakeholders:
Additional reference papers:
Beware the Boojum: caveats and strengths of avian radar
Author:
Josey Melick
Date:
7th August 2026