Budgies go head to head to help pilots prevent mid air collisions

In the world of civil aviation there are few things worse than the horror of mid air collisions.

Billions of dollars are spent on the very latest technology to keep aircraft safe in the increasingly more crowded skies above us.

Both pilots and air traffic controllers are highly skilled and undergo rigorous training which has to be updated on a regular basis.

In addition most modern passenger aircraft are equipped with hi-tech on-board systems which warn pilots when another aircraft gets too close.

Collisions

However new research from the University of Queensland could have enormous potential for automatic aircraft systems designed to prevent mid air collisions.

The study has revealed that when budgies are faced with a potential head on collision they always fly to the right.

In the study 10 budgies were released in pairs from opposite ends of a tunnel and filmed using high-speed video cameras for a total of 102 flights.

Not a single collision was observed throughout the study which also found that flight direction played no part in the collision avoidance behavior, ruling out the possible involvement of an internal compass.

Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, who lead the research team, said despite the modern advances in aviation, we still had much to learn from bird flight which evolved over more than 150 million years.

Rules

He said that up until now there had been no specific studies undertaken to understand how birds avoided mid air collisions.

Professor Srinivasan said: “Birds must have been under strong evolutionary pressure to establish basic rules and strategies to minimise the risk of collision in advance.

“Our modelling has shown that birds always veer right and sometimes they change their altitude as well, according to some pre-set preference.

“As air traffic becomes increasing busy, there is a pressing need for robust automatic systems for manned and unmanned aircraft, so there are real lessons to be learned from nature.

Strategies

“While we can’t say how birds solve the problem of switching to different altitudes, we can propose some simple strategies for autopilot systems and unmanned aerials vehicles to prevent head-on collisions.”

This research is being conducted in collaboration with Boeing Defence Australia and The Queensland University of Technology.

It was published in PLOS One and funded by the ARC and Boeing Defence Australia.

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