Birds complicate take-offs in Russia: third crash in 24 hours

• Accident: A plane with more than 200 passengers lands in a cornfield on the outskirts of Moscow

The birds are bittering the summer to travelers and pilots in Moscow. A passenger plane of the UTair company that covered the Moscow-Ufa route returned to Vnukovo Moscow airport because of a bird that entered the engine, airport sources told local agencies. It is the third event of this type that records Russian aviation in just over 24 hours. In this case, there were 97 passengers and six crew members on board .

The plane left the Vnukovo airport, (one of the smallest of the four that the capital has but frequently used by Russian President Vladimir Putin) at 12.31 Moscow time. At 12.55 I was making an emergency landing because of fault, once again from a collision with a flock of birds. The passengers were relocated to another plane to leave three hours later .

It is the second incident in the morning. Hours earlier a flight of the Pobeda airline delayed its departure in the Russian city of Mineralnye Vody. He had arrived from Moscow shortly before, and in the mandatory review a bird was found in the right engine.

Yesterday, another Russian passenger plane, also taking off from Moscow, hit a flock of birds. The pilot was forced to make a forced landing in a cornfield outside the Zhukovsky airport. The Airbus was carrying 226 passengers and a crew of seven people heading for Simferopol, a city on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014. Apparently it was "a flock of seagulls ," an official from the Federal Agency of Air Transportation to the TASS agency. Some passengers suffered minor injuries, but all survived. Damir Yusupov is the name of the commander of the A321 aircraft of Ural Airlines, which posed the plane smoothly without landing gear and with the engines off. The Russian press has highlighted its heroism and cold blood. "The pilot is a genius!" Exclaimed Olga, a passenger, in statements to the Russian newspaper 'Komsomolskaya Pravda'.

After returning to Yekaterinburg, the pilot addressed the passengers and apologized for not being able to deliver them to their destination, in Simferopol. "I was not afraid. I saw a cornfield in front of me. I expected us to settle more or less softly," said Yusupov, 41, at a press conference. The pilot also said he tried to land the plane at the lowest possible speed to "slip". When asked what he planned to do now, the crew commander said he had gone on vacation for the duration of the investigation measures and would not work in the short term. At the time 23 injured were reported but none seriously.

The Russians continue to share on social networks, 24 hours later, the shocking images of the failed take-off taken by the passengers. And the funny videos recorded shortly after, with travelers walking through a cornfield near the town of Ribaki and a kilometer from the airport. In Russia, the applause to the pilot is almost never lacking upon landing. According to various media, this time was no exception. From the Kremlin, his spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, said the crew is made up of "heroes who have saved many lives . " "I don't feel like a hero at all, because I did what I had to do: save the plane, the passengers and the crew," the commander explained.

The hero 'Sully'

The best known case is that of veteran pilot Chesley Sullenberger aka 'Sully' . On January 15, 2009, he took off from La Guardia airport in New York, with 154 passengers and crew. Two geese of about four kilos flew into each of the aircraft's engines. In a few seconds, he had to choose between trying to reach another track or make a risky landing on the water. 'Sully' pointed towards the Hudson River, a maneuver that, as the researchers finally concluded, was the only option.

In 1995, a US Air Force surveillance plane collided with birds on takeoff and the 24 crew members were killed. Birds are a widespread problem that normally does not cause an accident: in Spain 2018 there were 2,214 bird collisions with airplanes at airports.

Storks, vultures and seagulls are some of the species that most collide with airplanes. The risk zone has a perimeter of up to 40 kilometers around the runway, but 90% of the impacts occur when the plane is at an altitude of about 100 meters. 40% of the 'crashes' occur in the engines of the plane, another 40% in the nose and windshield and 7% in the wings, according to data from the SEPLA pilots union. The Russian Investigation Committee examines the incident and the Intergovernmental Aviation Committee (MAK), which is responsible for investigations of air accidents in Russia, created a special commission to analyze the circumstances.

Blame's fault

Svetlana Babina, one of the passengers on the plane who landed yesterday in an emergency, told the agency Ria Novosti that she had heard "a strange noise in the engine" just after takeoff. It is the sound of a bird jamming the metal parts. In the US, experts are working on creating radars that detect birds, but it is complicated because they are very small. The airplanes have improved and are now more resistant, and are tested by firing frozen birds at the windshield and at other points of the fuselage with a cannon. But in March a flight from Murcia had to make an emergency landing at the Alicante airport after hitting some birds. And in Bilbao the pilots have spent too many times touching the vultures. In fact, in 2018 the engine an Airbus 320 engulfed a vulture near Bilbao and several parts of the turbine fell on Zamudio homes.

The most effective way to force birds to move away from airports is to take away their habitat and the surroundings of Moscow can be a problem due to the presence of several landfills . The Ministry of Environment of Russia demanded yesterday that the garbage dumps near the Zhukovski airport be reviewed, from where the plane that landed in the cornfield came out, after the media and social networks pointed precisely to the accumulation of garbage in that area as a possible cause of the abundant presence of birds. In Russia the recycling is barely implemented and for two years the management of the huge amount of garbage produced by the main capitals of the country is cause for controversy and confrontation between administrations.

The problem of landfills near airports is not unique to Moscow. The pilots have complained about the Rafic Hariri International Airport in Beirut, where seagulls looking for food constantly cross each other in the airplanes. A scene reminiscent of the movie 'The Birds' by Hitchcock.

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