Mid-air collisions of planes with birds often have fatal consequences. A bird hitting the engine or other important mechanism can have a serious effect on a plane’s ability to fly.
But some birds can be friends.
At St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport those friends are the four falcons "hired" by the airport operator this summer to guard the runways from other birds.
When the falcons rise into the sky over the airport, they act as red traffic lights to all those seagulls, crows and ducks that dare to fly near the landing and take-off routes.
Every year Pulkovo airport has incidents in which planes landing or taking off ram into birds flying above the airfield," said Andrei Sokolov, head of Pulkovo's ornithology service. "Everything we tried previously to counter this produced little result."
The airplane industry estimates at least 350 people have been killed as a result of bird strikes since the dawn of aviation. The problem is growing worse because of increasing numbers of birds and planes.
The deadliest bird-plane collision was in 1960, when an Eastern Airlines jet struck a flock of starlings and crashed into Boston Harbor, killing 62 people.
In 1995, an Air Force plane crashed in Alaska, killing 24 crewmen, after geese were sucked into one of the plane's engines.
Most bird strikes occur at low altitude during the most dangerous time of any flight, the take-off or landing.
When the falcons arrived at Pulkovo from a nursery in the city of Voronezh in early July there was a noticeable difference.
The falcons don't chase birds that approach the airport; they simply frighten other birds off with their presence because all other birds are by instinct afraid of the birds of prey.
Similar falcon or hawk services operate at airports in other countries, including the U.S., Germany, Britain and Poland.
Falcons are being introduced to quite a few other Russian airports.
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