Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Understanding Aircraft Bird Strikes: (Messing Around with Tableau)

Ok I'll admit it, I'm a bit of a nervous flyer.  I'm the guy on the plane who looks around at all the flight attendants after every little bump or noise to make sure nothing's wrong.  So when a United Airlines 737 was taken down by a flock of geese, that was the last thing I needed to hear about.  I had no idea something as small as a bird could have such an impact on a 30 ton aircraft.

And then there was that episode of Mythbusters where they shot chickens out of a cannon into an old aircraft frame to see the damage.

Even though it turns out they were shooting frozen chickens (they forgot to thaw them), the results were still scary.

So how frequent are bird strikes?  And when do they occur?  I was given a dataset containing information about all the recorded bird strikes over the past 12 years.  The first thing I noticed was that the file was almost 100,00 lines long.  Crap.

Fortunately, out of these 100,000 strikes there were only 107 injuries and 5 fatalities.  Humans seemed to fare much better than the birds.  In order to get the most out of this rich dataset, I used Tableau--a data visualization product that can make some fancy interactive visualizations.

This is what I came up with

To get a full appreciation for the interactive nature of Tableau you have to click the link above.  Here are some highlights.

I had no idea that bird can fly as high as 25,000 feet!  It makes sense that some of the most damaging (costliest) strikes occurred when the plane was traveling fast at a higher altitude.

Texas and California have had the most strikes, but this is a bit misleading.  They are also the most populous states, and have some of the nation's largest airports.  There are many more flights originating in these two states compared to other smaller states.  That means there are many more chances for a strike.

The majority of strikes occur in clear skies during the day.

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