Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Special Presentation for Safety Week
Monday, April 26, 2010 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Adam Kelly
"Beware of the Birds"
ABSTRACT -- Public attenuation has been focused on the birdstrike issue following the ditching of US Airways flight 1549 produced the "Miracle on the Hudson" in January 2009. The history of catastrophic birdstrikes to aircraft is almost as long as the history of aviation. The potential impact forces exerted on an airframe in a birdstrike result from the kinetic energy of the bird impact equivalent to one-half the bird mass times the velocity squared ((1/2)mv2 ). In practice, a glancing blow will impart less energy to the structure of an aircraft, but ultimately the larger the mass of a bird, or the denser the mass of a flock of birds, the more significant the hazard to an aircraft. The question is at what point does the mass encountered in a birdstrike, away from an airfield and outside the control of an airport operator, constitute an unacceptable risk to aviation safety? This is a question that has yet to be answered in civil aviation. On the first "return to flight" mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery on July 26, 2005 a 5lb+ Turkey Vulture struck the main tank. The vulture caused no damage to the external tank it impacted, but if the bird had been a few hundred feet higher when the shuttle would have been moving much faster, or if the impact had occurred in a different and less robust area of the shuttle, the result could have been much different. NASA confronted head on the challenge of what constitutes unacceptable risk to safe shuttle operations and among other measures introduced radar sensors to help manage the risk. The presentation will focus on how NASA's birdstrike risk management strategy for the space shuttle program is applicable to modern civil aviation and how the agencies broad multidisciplinary expertise could play a key role in the future.
SPEAKER -- T. Adam Kelly was born and grew up in the United Kingdom. He managed to turn his childhood practice of the art of Falconry into a full time job as a contractor to the United States Air Force controlling birds to prevent birdstrikes on Military Airfields in England. After receiving a masters Degree in Conservation Biology from The University of Kent, Canterbury England he moved to the United States in 1994. Adam is currently a Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at DeTect-Inc and has been Detects Program Manager for NASA's Avian Radar System since 2006 and has participated in more than a dozen launches of the Space Shuttle. Adam was naturalized as a US Citizen in 2008.