Dr. Jerry LeMieux has over thirty-five years and 10,000 hours of aviation experience. He has flown military fighter aircraft and is a major airline pilot. He was responsible for solving national aviation issues as an Executive Safety Chairman for the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA). He is currently developing both ground- and airborne-based radar collision avoidance systems for Unmanned Air Systems. He has been on the staff and faculty at MIT, Boston University, Daniel Webster College, and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University where he taught courses in electrical and aeronautical engineering and advanced mathematics. He has published technical papers on radar design and has been a Chairman and Technical Paper Selection Committee Member for the National and International Radar Conferences, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, in addition to being a member of several professional organizations. While piloting a fighter aircraft, he has personally experienced an aircraft bird strike that resulted in significant loss of thrust in a jet engine. He recently filed a patent for a ground-based radar system that sends bird targets to the cockpit to prevent aircraft bird strikes. The technology is available today to permanently solve this worldwide problem.

Bird strikes are one of the most dangerous threats to civil and military flight safety: between 1960 and 2014, they were responsible for the destruction of approximately 150 civil aircraft and the deaths of 271 people. Bird Strike presents a summary of the damage imposed on the aviation industries by their avian counterparts. This book first presents and analyzes the statistics obtained from bird strike databases and offers various methods for minimizing the overall probability of bird-strike events. The next chapters explore how to analyze the ability of aero-engine critical structures to withstand bird-strike events by implementing reliable experimental, theoretical, and numerical methods. Finally, the book investigates the impact of bird strikes on different components of aircrafts, such as the metal fuselage, composite fuselage, engines, wings, and tail, and proposes two new bird models, with explanations of their use. - Provides up-to-date information for aviation staff and researchers working on aircraft safety - Offers comprehensive investigations on all the statistical, theoretical, experimental, and numerical aspects of bird strike - Includes studies carried out on bird strike and provides the reader with the important findings of each paper

On a warm and golden afternoon, October 4, 1960, a Lockheed Electra jet turboprop carrying 72 souls took off from Logan Airport. Seconds later, the plane slammed into a flock of 10,000 starlings, and abruptly plummeted into Winthrop Harbor. The collision took 62 lives and gave rise to the largest rescue mobilization in Boston's history, which included civilians in addition to police, firefighters, skindivers, and Navy and Coast Guard air-sea rescue teams. Largely because of the quick action and good seamanship of Winthrop citizens, many of them boys in small boats, ten passengers survived what the Civil Aeronautics Board termed "a non-survivable crash." Using firsthand interviews with survivors of the crash, rescuers, divers, aeronautics experts, and ornithologists, as well as a wide range of primary source material, Kalafatas foregrounds the story of the crash and its aftermath to anchor a broader inquiry into developments in the aeronautics industry, the increase in the number of big birds in the skies of North America, and the increasing danger of "bird strikes." Along the way he looks into interesting historical sidelights such as the creation of Logan Airport, the transformation of Boston's industrial base to new technologies, and the nature of journalistic investigations in the early 1960s. The book is a rare instance when an author can simultaneously write about a fascinating historical event and a clear and present danger today. Kalafatas calls for and itemizes solutions that protect both birds and the traveling public.