Composition or encounter? Decomposing the altitude and night-time damage premiums in wildlife strikes to civil aircraft in the United States

Composition or encounter? Decomposing the altitude and night-time damage premiums in wildlife strikes to civil aircraft in the United States

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

Add a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.


Comments

There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.

Downloads

Download Preprint

Supplementary Files

Authors

Denys Kolomiiets 

Abstract

Damaging wildlife strikes to civil aircraft are commoner above 500 ft and at night, patterns usually attributed to the animals involved. Using the FAA National Wildlife Strike Database (354,564 reports, 1990–2026), damage probabilities were directly standardised to a common taxon mix under three standard populations, separately for aircraft up to and above 5,700 kg. Standardisation removed 66 to 80% of the night excess in lighter and 65 to 95% in heavier aircraft, leaving 1.07 (1.001–1.15) and 1.04 (0.99–1.09). How much remains is not settled: it varies with the coding of the outcome (1.04 to 1.10 and 0.97 to 1.04) and with whether unidentified birds are treated as composition, and intervals that resample airports include 1. Composition removed less of the altitude excess, where ratios stayed at 1.90 to 2.30 and 1.70 to 2.33 and the association held within individual taxa. Among heavier aircraft it weakened once recorded airspeed was held: on airspeeds present on both sides of 500 ft the ratio fell from 1.50 to between 1.10 and 1.24, and to 1.14 on 10-kt bins. Damage probability levelled off above 1,500 ft in lighter aircraft but not in heavier ones. Airspeed is recorded selectively and species identification depends on damage and height, so collision energy and the selective reporting of strikes at altitude cannot be separated here. Hazard assessments for climb and approach corridors should not rest on species presence alone.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/X2C67R

Subjects

Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Keywords

bird strikes, wildlife-aircraft collisions, damage severity, flight altitude, confounding, airport ecology

Dates

Published: 2026-09-11 15:23

Last Updated: 2026-09-21 13:07

Older Versions

License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Conflict of interest statement:
The author operates FlightFinder (himaxym.com), the aviation-data site whose open pipeline produces the aggregate dataset analysed here. The work received no external funding, and no other competing interests are declared.

Data and Code Availability Statement:
All analyses use freeze 2026-09-07 of the aggregated FAA National Wildlife Strike Database, published on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22648954 (version of record); concept DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21347859. The aggregation and analysis scripts, including the within-taxon stratification and the odds-ratio computation, are in an open code annex: https://gist.github.com/disclaimer8/330a1032781a68acb1e55181f05dc77c

Language:
English

Metrics

Views: 143

Downloads: 36