Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes
- A South Korean airplane crash, potentially caused by a bird strike, is under investigation.
- Salt Lake International Airport faces frequent bird strikes due to its location near bird habitats.
- The airport employs various measures to mitigate bird strikes, including wildlife monitoring and habitat management.
SALT LAKE CITY — A South Korean airplane carrying 181 passengers exploded in a ball of flames after experiencing what appeared to be a mechanical failure as it attempted to land on Sunday morning. The only survivors were two crew members.
The cause of the crash, which was the deadliest air disaster ever on South Korean soil, is still uncertain. Videos showed that neither the front or back landing gear had descended. Flaps used to decelerate the plane were also inactive. And, unusually, only one engine had deployed its thrust reverser.
Investigators are looking to birds as a possible culprit for the strange landing that resulted in a tragic collision.
Four minutes before the fatal crash, the airplane pilot issued a distress signal and reported a bird strike. The report came just two minutes after ground control sent a message warning of birds in the area.
Moments before the plane skidded along the runway and crashed into a concrete fence, one passenger said in a phone call, "We can't land because a bird (or birds) caught in our wing," CNN reported.
The plane's flight path was located near multiple bird feeding and roosting areas. However, a final answer to why the plane crashed will likely take months to uncover as investigators analyze data from the plane's two black boxes.
Do bird strikes happen in Utah?
Bird strikes are a normal occurrence in aviation, including in Utah. But they rarely cause any damage, let alone cause a plane to crash.
The highest profile bird strike in recent memory happened in 2021 when the Utah Jazz's charter flight was forced to return to the Salt Lake airport after colliding with a flock of birds during takeoff. The bird strike damaged the left engine, producing a small explosion and leaving the engine completely dysfunctional.
"Bird strikes are common," according to Alex Blanchard. "They just don't cause damage because a lot of the birds that are hit by our aircraft are the smaller birds."
Blanchard runs the Air Ops wildlife department at the Salt Lake airport, where she has worked for two years. Her team of five runs a 24/7 surveillance operation across a 5-mile radius surrounding the airport, including thousands of acres of grasslands and dozens of buildings.
Their mission: bird strike mitigation.
The Salt Lake International Airport is located to the south of the Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve, an important nesting ground for hundreds of species of birds, and the airport sits right in the middle of wetlands, multiple duck-hunting clubs, a seagull-covered landfill and multiple migratory bird routes in the spring and fall.
This location makes the Salt Lake airport a hotspot for bird strikes. There were 418 reported bird strikes at the Salt Lake airport in 2024, 294 in 2023, and 311 in 2022. With approximately 219,000 flights going in and out of Salt Lake City every year, this averages out to roughly one bird strike every 524 arrivals and departures.
What kind of birds collide with planes?
Of the 418 bird strikes, 48 involved raptors, 64 involved waterfowl, 16 involved gulls and 290 involved other birds. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wildlife strike database shows that the majority of bird strikes at the Salt Lake airport involve small species of birds, like swallows, larks and sparrows, but the list also includes bats.
Smaller birds almost never cause any damage, Blanchard said. This year, 14 bird strikes resulted in damage to the aircraft, according to the official SLC Wildlife Strike Review, and 20 other bird strikes were categorized as "triggering," which means they involved multiple strikes at once or a major event like engine ingestion.
FAA data shows that some of these damaging bird strikes were caused by California gull, White-headed gull, Swainson's Hawk, Sora, American robin and Green-winged teal.
In most cases, a plane damaged by a bird strike can still complete its flight or make an emergency landing, even if "a bird gets ingested into one of the engines," Blanchard said.
But even minimal damage can have high costs. If a bird damages an engine, it can take as much as $2 million to repair, Blanchard said. Even fixing damage to the skin of the aircraft can cost upwards of half a million dollars.
"And so it's our job to make sure we're out there doing what we do, constant patrolling, constant mitigating, to make sure that we reduce the likelihood of any of that," Blanchard said.
How do they decrease bird strikes?
From their headquarters just north of the SLC Air Traffic Control Tower, Blanchard and her wildlife mitigation team coordinate with airport authorities and airfield specialists to make sure aircraft steer clear of hard-to-reach flocks of birds.
The wildlife mitigation department pays meticulous attention to migration patterns and has constant eyes on the sky, allowing them to create heat maps representing the areas most likely to have bird traffic, Blanchard said.
Blanchard and her team spend their days scouring the land surrounding the airport and inspecting the buildings on airport grounds, looking for birds to scare away, or "haze." Birds that stay put are captured for relocation.
The tools at Blanchard's disposal to keep birds from interfering with flights include various "pyrotechnics" that shoot up to 300 or 1,000 feet and emit loud noises to scare away large groups of high-flying birds like pelicans or geese.
But much of the work that is done is to prevent flocks from wanting to pass near the airport in the first place. Blanchard's team works with the airport's landscaping crew to keep surrounding grasslands cut short and to plant grasses that do not seed or flower so as to not attract grasshoppers and other bugs that birds feed on.
The wildlife mitigation team also recently started disking the airport's surrounding fields six inches deep to remove the presence of voles, which also serve as food for some birds. Since making this change in the last year, Blanchard's team has trapped 20% fewer birds in the field, she said.
To protect larger birds, like owls, hawks and eagles, the airport's wildlife mitigation department has constructed their own traps — six large traps around their inspection perimeter and six more mobile traps that are moved daily within their inspection interior — that have small birds or homegrown mice as bait.
Once these large birds are intercepted, they are immediately brought back to the headquarters where they are measured, tagged and relocated to different areas, depending on the bird species, within about two hours of the airport.
At the height of the migratory season, Blanchard said her team relocates multiple birds every day. They must do so within 24 hours, according to federal regulations.
