COLLISIONS WITH BIRDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 125, 28 May 1932, Page 8 (Supplement)

COLLISIONS WITH BIRDS.

LATEST FLYING MENACE. CRUISING KITES AND FAST MACHINES. When airplanes were slow a pilot gave little thought to the birds. Now that machines are faster than any living thing, birds have become a menace. Most airports lie in the country, and are therefore infested with sleepy hawks, crows, buzzards, and kites, depending on their location. In the pages of the British periodical "The Aeroplane," a flyer reports an encounter with a kite only 30ft from the ground. A propeller blade was torn off and the machine turned over in a field.

More, stirring and dangerous was the encounter of a British Army officer, at 1500 ft, with a kite-hawk in India. A sudden shudder through the 'plane prompted him to make a rapid but careful landing. The leading edge of the port bottom plane had been crushed by the blow. The kite-hawk itself was picked up by the mechanics. Every bone in its body was apparently broken.

The editor of "The Aeroplane" is convinced that "we shall arrive at a state of affairs when all vultures, eagles, kites, and buzzards, which are too slow-witted to get out of the way of airplanes or so pugnacious that they attack them, have been killed off in collision." Not being a very good biologist, he also suggests that possibly a race of quick-witted and peaceful birds will evolve after some airplanes have been wrecked with the loss of human life.