Smithsonian Aids Plane Crash Investigation
The top bird experts in the world are trying to identify what type of bird took down US Airways Flight 1549, which crashed in the Hudson River.
Pieces of the wreckage are now in the hands of top investigators.
The black boxes went to the National Transportation Safety Board, the engines to the manufacturer’s experts, and a bird feather to a Smithsonian museum.
Last year, a staff of four took in samples for 4,600 bird-plane collisions at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Correctly identifying the species involved in a bird strike can be important, said Carla J. Dove, the lab’s director.
“If people know the cause of a problem, they can do something about it,” she said. “If you have cockroaches, you don’t call an ant exterminator.”
One way to stop the problem is to force the species out of the area by mowing some land, or filling in a pond frequented by a species of duck.
The feathers or other bird parts submitted are compared against a library of 620,000 bird samples.
Some feathers came from Darwin others Audubon, and many from Theodore Roosevelt, who collected birds around the family home in Oyster Bay, on Long Island, before he switched to hunting big game.
If researchers have no luck with feathers, they use a DNA database; the success rate of identifying the type of bird involved is 99 percent.
A bird strike over the Bronx reported by the pilot minutes after Flight 1549 took off from La Guardia Airport may have caused both engines to fail, forcing the emergency splash into the Hudson, which all 155 people on board survived. The feather was discovered attached to one of the plane’s wings.
Crash investigation is a relatively recent endeavor for the museum. “This collection started before there were even airplanes,” said Marcy Heacker, one of the museum’s investigators, referring to the vast repository of birds.
However, safety investigators have called on the Smithsonian for help, after an October 1960 crash at Logan Airport in Boston, in which an Eastern Airlines Electra hit a flock of starlings.
Government records show five crashes due to bird strikes with scheduled airliners in this decade, not counting Flight 1549.
Feathers that are intact can be matched against a sample. If fluff or down is all that survives, researchers using 100-power magnification will look at the pattern of nodes on the microscopic feather structures to identify them.
Researchers say the bird DNA database is not as good as the one for humans. The lab may not be able to say how many individual birds were involved.
The lab is filled with aisles of floor-to-ceiling cabinets, with drawers brimming with samples of all kinds. There are eggs from ostriches the size of a big grapefruit, and from hummingbirds closer to the size of a breath mint.
The bird researchers believe future uses will be found for their library. It is already useful for gathering data that could indicate climate change, Dr. Dove said because birds are hitting planes in places and at times of year where they were probably not present years ago.
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