The collision of an aircraft with a bird has long been a dangerous and little predictable situation, but most often occurs during take-off and landing. A single bird can cause the engine to fail if it gets into it. A flock of birds is already a real "natural air defense", which threatens with an accident and death to all passengers. Scientists of different countries have long been fighting this problem. Engineers from the United States, Great Britain and South Korea have developed a rather unexpected system that takes birds away from the airfields in advance, thereby reducing the probability of aircraft colliding with birds in the most dangerous part of the flight.
Traditional systems usually simply scare the birds with light and sound signals. It is possible to use trained predator birds. But these methods are not very effective - birds can only be scared, the trajectory of their future flight will be unexpected.
Moving in a flock, the birds are guided by their neighbors on the flight, in order to correct the trajectory of the movement and not to collide with each other. This is the feature of behavior that scientists have learned to use. It is enough to adjust the trajectory of the flock on the one hand to take them all away from the runway.
Having calculated at what distance neighbors should fly so that it does not cause panic, scientists could make a "control system of a flock of birds". This requires at least two drones. The first, corrective, flies much above the flock and works as an observer. The second simulates a bird in a flock. Approaching the nearest to airfield side of the flock, it ensures the evacuation of the entire flock away from the airfield.
Positive results have already been obtained with small groups of birds. The work continues, as it is necessary to obtain convincing results with large or several small, but scattered groups of birds. In addition, it is necessary to create an infrastructure to monitor the situation around each airport and the sites where the drones will be deployed with personnel.
In the near future such use of the UAV can prevent the aircraft from colliding with the birds. The main directions of the use of drones in agriculture today are the monitoring of the state of fields and the applicating of the plant protection products (Trichogramma), and the Japanese developers «taught» the drones to protect the crop from nocturnal insects.
