In recent years, civil drones have become more and more visible in everyday life. There are numerous reports in the media covering a variety of drone aspects and technical developments. In addition, everyone is used to bird's-eye views as common features in television, movies and photography. However, little is known about how the public perceives this development. This article reports the results of a representative national study on the acceptance of civilian drones. Overall, a balanced but slightly positive attitude towards civil drones was revealed. Factors analyzed include age, gender, place of residence or interest in technical matters, as well as the individual level of knowledge about the topic. Free verbal associations with the general term drone are described as well as concerns about the usage of civil drones. Concerning different applications of civil drones, results indicate clear approval in Germany for the use of drones in civil protection, rescue missions and research work. However, flights for advertising, leisure and parcel delivery purposes are disagreed with by at least half of those questioned. In the presentation of the results, this article describes social acceptance of civilian drones and thus helps to better understand the perception of civil unmanned aerial vehicles.

Collisions between birds and aircraft pose a severe threat to aviation and avian safety. To understand and prevent these bird strikes, knowledge about the factors leading to these bird strikes is vital. However, even though it is a global issue, data availability strongly varies and is difficult to put into a global picture. This paper aims to close this gap by providing an in-depth review of studies and statistics to obtain a concise overview of the bird strike problem in commercial aviation on an international level. The paper illustrates the factors contributing to the occurrence and the potential consequences in terms of effect on flight and damage. This is followed by a presentation of the risk-reducing measures currently in place as well as their limitations. The paper closes with an insight into current research investigating novel methods to prevent bird strikes.

Feasibility of a new air traffic management concept is examined which might increase the efficiency of en-route operations by up to 100%. The concept follows the idea of a sector-less airspace organization. Aircraft entering the airspace (e.g. the German airspace or the entire European Airspace) will be assigned to one controller who is in charge of controlling the aircraft from entry point (or TMA exit point) to exit point of the airspace (or TMA entry point). First simple real time simulations revealed very promising results. The concept seems to enable an easy transition into a user preferred trajectory (direct-to) operations whilst at the same time increasing ATCO's efficiency and airspace capacity.

Annually, thousands of birds collide with aircraft. The impact usually has lethal consequences for the bird, the involved aircraft can experience severe damage. The highest bird strike risk occurs at low altitudes. Therefore, aircraft within the airport area as well as the adjacent approach and departure corridors are especially vulnerable to collisions with birds. To analyse risk-reducing measures in these areas, a fast-time bird strike simulation environment was developed. An open-source Air Traffic Management simulator was enhanced with a model to represent bird movements and to recognize bird strikes. To confirm the reproducibility of the outcome, Monte Carlo simulations were performed. They included bird movement data from one year and air traffic flight plans for various air traffic volumes. The number of strikes and near misses showed an expected variance within the individual replications. The results indicate that the predictability of the number of strikes and near misses increases with rising number of birds, and rising air traffic intensity. Thus, by considering simulation scenarios including bird movement information from all seasons and a sufficient air traffic volume, the described set-up leads to stable results.

Involving air traffic controllers and pilots into the bird strike prevention process is considered an essential step to increase aviation and avian safety. Prior to implementing operational measures such as real-time warning systems, it is vital to evaluate their feasibility. This paper studies the efficacy of a bird strike advisory system for air traffic control. In addition to the potential safety benefit, the possible impact on airport operations is analyzed. To this end, a previously developed collision avoidance algorithm underlying the system was tested in fast-time Monte Carlo simulations involving various air traffic and bird densities to obtain representative conclusions for different operational conditions. The results demonstrate the strong safety potential of operational bird strike prevention in case of precise bird movement prediction. Unless airports operate close to their capacity limits while bird abundance is high, the induced delays remain tolerable. Prioritization of hazardous strikes involving large individuals as well as flocks of birds are expected to support operational feasibility in all conditions.