Rostec Develops Bird Protection System for Passenger Aircraft

Ruselectronics holding, a subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned Rostec, has developed a bird protection system for airports - Orni.

The system is able to track the flight of up to a hundred birds simultaneously at a distance of up to 21 km. The equipment has successfully passed test operation at the Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg.

Orni includes a subsystem for radar detection and tracking, equipped with one to four passive coherent locators, as well as a subsystem for interfacing with bioacoustic emitters and other devices that scare away birds that find themselves in a dangerous zone for flying. The devices do not interfere with and do not affect the operation of the radio equipment of aircraft and airports.

The complex received software that records and archives all bird flights, as well as controls the operation of subsystems and exchanges information with other airport services. All Orni work is carried out automatically.

As part of Rostec, the development is being carried out by an enterprise of the Ruselectronics holding - Research Institute Vector. 

“According to the International Civil Aviation Organization, more than 5,000 bird strikes occur annually in the world. In almost half of the cases, birds get into the engine, after which the plane has to return to the airport. Our new system accurately tracks the flights of birds near the airport and scares them away during takeoffs and landings,” said Andrey Sorokin, Director of Commercial Activities at Vector Research Institute.