Citation

Roca-González JL, Vera-Lopez JA, Rodriguez-Bermudez G. Safety Sci. 2020; 122: e104520.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2019.104520

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Most cited research regarding wildlife strikes on airports state that this causes economic losses of approximately USD1.2 billion annually to the global air transport sector. Airport security managers address this problem by deploying several well-known countermeasures, including outsourcing wildlife control services (WCS) to perform preventive actions. Among these actions, the use of raptors plays an important role due to their effectiveness in dispersing wildlife. This paper aims to characterise the organisational and cost aspects of such services to provide a baseline reference, by applying a case study analysis methodology on Spanish civil and military air transport data, crossing strike records, the number of flight operations per airport, and WCS bidding for the years 2010 to 2016. The case study highline how the damages due to wildlife strikes are expected to cost a minimum of EUR 9 million and a maximum of EUR 44 Million to Spanish air transport industry, meanwhile the investment in prevention services for such hazard cost almost EUR 2.5 Million to airport safety managers, including airport falconry with a median cost of EUR 6666 per raptor requested. This can also be expressed as a median cost service for each airport ranging from EUR 0.023 to 0.036 per passenger, what may establish a baseline reference for future research to determine new WCS efficiency indicators and the fundaments to reject a budget reduction on airport wildlife control services in contrast with the damage cost when such hazards happens.

Language: en

Keywords

Airport falconry organisation; Service cost baseline; Wildlife strike hazard