Trends in reporting of wildlife strikes with civil aircraft and in identification of species struck under a primarily voluntary reporting system, 1990-2013

in reporting of wildlife strikes with civil aircraft and in identification of species struck under a primarily Executive Summary Reporting of wildlife strikes with civil aircraft is voluntary for airports and pilots but strongly encouraged by the FAA via Advisory Circulars and other activities. In 2009, the FAA undertook a review of the trends in strike reporting from 1990-2008 to determine if mandatory reporting was needed, as was recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board in 2009. The review concluded that given the positive trends in reporting rates and species identification coupled with the decline or stabilization in damage strikes, mandatory reporting was not recommended at that time (2009) to achieve the objectives of the database. Recommendations were made to further enhance the reporting of strikes. The objective of this report is to determine if the positive trends in reporting documented in 2009 have been sustained based on the recommended outreach actions and if any changes are needed in FAA policies regarding strike reporting at this time. The primary focus is to examine strike reporting for the past 5 years (2009-2013) compared to the previous 5 years (2004-2008). Although this report covers both commercial and general aviation aircraft at Part 139-certificated and non-certificated airports as was done in the 2009 study, the focus of this report is strike reporting for commercial aircraft at Part 139 airports. I examined the overall number of strikes and damage strikes reported to the FAA by wildlife type (birds, mammals, reptiles) and by airport type (14 CFR Part 139 certificated airports, non-certificated General Aviation [GA] airports in the National Plan of Integrated Airport System [NPIAS], and other GA airports). To derive estimates of the percentage of strikes being reported to the NWSD by commercial aircraft and by all civil aircraft (commercial and general aviation) at Part 139 airports nationwide, I compared strike reporting rates at 20 selected Part 139 airports that have well established wildlife hazard management programs that emphasize the reporting of all known strikes with strike reporting rates at other Part 139 airports. As another means of gauging the number of known bird strikes that are not being reported to the NWSD, I examined bird strike reports submitted independent of the NWSD through the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) Mandatory Occurrence Reporting (MOR) system. Another objective was to document the number of strike events that are being reported independently by multiple sources to determine …