Border collies prove effective in controlling wildlife at airports

Using of collie dogs is a relatively new method of reducing populations of birds and other wildlife that may be hazardous to aircraft operations at airports.

The Border collie dogs can be found on the airfield itself, patrolling and keeping birds and other wildlife at a safe distance.

Several years ago, the only dogs found at airports across the world were those employed as customs and police agents, assisting air­port officers in detecting bombs, contra­band, weapons and other illegal or dan­gerous items.

Today Border collies serve as an effective means of wildlife control in airport envi­ronments. Airports attract large numbers of birds and deer. Many wildlife dispersal methods seek to imitate predators but become ineffective as the birds or deer habituate to the stimulus.

Border collies, how­ever, are true predators and prevent habituation. Border collies may be less effective against smaller bird species, such as swallows and dunlins, and they do not prevent gulls and other birds from overflying the airport or raptors from hunting on the airport.

The Border collie dogs are more effective against big birds. The dogs can prevent pairs of cranes from nest­ing or roosting; water­fowl and wading birds are flushed by dogs in open areas.

Results of the wildlife control programme at Dover airport, which introduced Border collies, demonstrated that an essential percentage of large birds were excluded from the air base and the sur­rounding farmlands. So the number of bird strikes to aircraft dropped.

Border collies require daily work and exercise. Qualified dogs are expensive. But they are very effective, that’s why they should be considered as one method of control to be used in combination with other wildlife control procedures.

Unit 8. Hazardous conditions in flight. Threat and error management

 42 Exercise 1.

Cabin safety

Threat categories

Applying the threat and error management (TEM) model to cabin oper­ations, threats can be classified in five broad categories, as described below.

The first of these categories, operational threats, includes elements such as adverse weather. Turbulence, for instance, is a threat to cabin safety that may result in injuries to passengers or cabin crew if the cabin and galley are not properly secured or if passengers are not seated in a timely manner. Among other operational threats affecting cabin crew are time constraints, unfamiliar cabins or galley configurations, flight diversions and abnormal operational events such as reject­ed take-offs.

Another category, flight deck threats, concerns events originating on the flight deck, or more specifically errors made by the flight crew. In high-workload situa­tions, for example, pilots may omit to inform the cabin crew of anticipated tur­bulence.

Crew support threats include errors made by maintenance personnel, ground crew or dispatch personnel. Faulty equipment that has not been repaired, errors in passenger load paperwork, or omissions about cabin abnormalities in the defect logbook, can all produce situa­tions that require cabin crew threat man­agement.

Aircraft threats involve malfunctions that can compromise cabin safety. Equip­ment malfunctions or abnormalities, such as an overheating oven, are typical of the threats in this category. Communi­cation system problems, such as the failure of the public address system or interphone, can diminish cabin safety.

Passenger threats: Safety can also be endangered by pas­sengers who are violent, abusive or intoxi­cated, or who disregard instructions from the cabin crew. Passengers may attempt to smoke in the lavatories or try unlawfully to enter the flight deck. These situations pose threats to safety that require manage­ment by the cabin crew. Passenger threats not only have the potential to reduce safety, but may cause distractions that result in cabin crew errors.

 43 Exercise 2.