This paper presents a fast-time simulation environment for assessing the risk of bird strikes in aviation. An existing air traffic simulator was enhanced in order to simulate air and bird traffic simultaneously and to recognize collisions between birds and aircraft. Furthermore, a method was developed to generate bird movement information from different radar sources. The resulting set-up represents the first simulation environment to perform fast-time simulations including air traffic and bird movements. A verification with real data revealed that approximately thrice as many bird strikes occur in the simulation as in reality. When considering bird reaction to approaching aircraft, which is not covered in the simulation as well as unreported strikes, this implies an adequate result. For this reason, the simulator can serve as valuable tool to analyse the risk of bird strikes and to evaluate new Air Traffic Management concepts to reduce the number of these events. @en

The presented research evaluates the concept of providing an airport’s Air Traffic Control with a bird strike advisory system. Such a system informs the controller about current and predicted bird movements in the arrival and departure corridors. Based on this information, the controller can decide to delay or reroute air traffic in order to prevent collisions with birds. To evaluate the resulting effects on the airport’s safety and capacity, fast-time simulations merging air traffic and bird movements, will be performed. To represent realistic bird movements, inputs from two different radar types are combined. For the close airport environment, historic bird tracks from avian radar installed at the considered airport serve as source. To cover the arrival and departure corridors up to 3000ft, the altitude up to which the largest majority of bird strikes occur, data from weather radar is used: based on bird densities and speed directions, bird tracks are generated for different altitude bands. The obtained tracks from avian and weather radar are combined in order to retrieve the overall image of bird movements in the close and extended airport area. This paper describes the methods for extracting, generating and finally combining the inputs from the two radar sources, in order to generate realistic bird movements. These will serve as a key input parameter for evaluating the effects of a bird strike advisory system with fast-time simulations.@en