Wildlife strike risk assessment : development of new methodologies in two International Italian airports

Aircraft collisions with wildlife, hereafter wildlife strikes, are a growing threat to civil aviation safety. Of these wildlife strikes, bird-aircraft collisions (hereafter birdstrikes) are of major concern because of the strike frequency and associated damage. Importantly, these wildlife-strike statistics reflect an increasing risk to aviation safety due to the considerable increase of air traffic and growth of the civil aviation industry, demographic explosion of synanthropic bird species and their habituation to live in human-modified habitats and to exploit food sources deriving from human activities. Furthermore, airports are highly attractive for wildlife, whose presence pose substantial hazards to aviation, leading to a high occurrence of wildlife strikes. As a consequence, the adoption of strategies aimed to limit the wildlife-aircrafts collisions at airports and keep under control the risk is strongly needed. The current PhD research project fits into this perspective, with the aim to develop new tools for wildlife strike risk assessment, which may be used by airport managers to improve the aviation safety worldwide. The study has been conducted in two international Italian airports: The Venice Marco Polo airport and the Treviso Antonio Canova airport, highly attended by wildlife since located in very important naturalistic areas, respectively on the inland border of the Venice lagoon and along the River Sile Regional Natural Park. The main objective of the research is to develop a new holistic bio-geographic risk index or Attraction Risk Index (ARI) for birdstrike risk assessment. The innovation of the ARI risk index is to combine the environmental features and attractive sites for wildlife around airports, with the wildlife attending the studied airport as well as the recorded air traffic and birdstrikes. Additionally, the present study is intended to provide information on the relative attractiveness of sources to wildlife in order to highlight the most appealing ones, thus the most hazardous from an aviation perspective. Results from the study will help in dealing with airport management problems and safety improvement.