Lasers and giant speakers: How airports chase birds off the runway
Around 360,000 flights land and take off from Singapore's Changi airport each year.
Yet hardly anyone ever thinks about what it takes to keep the runways clean.
Birds for one, pose a huge problem to most airplanes.
A bird getting sucked into an engine or striking a windscreen could cause a possibly fatal accident -- and has in the past forced pilots to make emergency landings or crashes.
In Singapore, the solution lies in the Airside Safety Rover -- a vehicle fitted with a long range acoustic device (LRAD), a loudspeaker of sorts that is designed to broadcast sounds to scare away the birds.
Marcus, a crew member at Changi airport, gets up at 6:30am every morning to drive the rover around the runway -- and repeats the process in the afternoon.
The LRAD plays around 20 different sounds -- from gunshots to predator calls -- each of which are targeted to scare away specific birds. The sounds are also rotated so the birds don't get too used to one particular sound.
Here's one of the sounds used (warning, it's pretty jarring):
If he encounters larger birds, Marcus gets out of the car and manually points the LRAD at them to chase them away.
"We encounter everything from mynah birds to white belly sea eagles and other raptors," he says.
"If small birds get sucked into the engine, it should be ok [for the plane], but if its a large bird they'll damage the fan blades and the engine will be down...so our main purpose is to [scare away] the larger birds because they cause more damage."
The huge laser pointer
If the sounds end up ineffective in scaring the birds away, there's always this massive laser pointer.
The laser pointer is pretty much the last resort crew members have in scaring away birds if nothing else works.
"It's a green laser beam that shoots out -- only green lights work in scaring them, red and blue don't," says Marcus.
"You have to point it right at the bird's face. It's like a weapon; we can't point it at anyone else because it's very bright."
Birds aren't the only animals Marcus has to deal with.
"There was a dog incident once, it ran across the runway...we have no choice but to lay traps for such animals," he explained.
"Even sea otters come in sometimes, but they are endangered so no traps [for them]. Sometimes it feels like a mini zoo."
Sweeping up the runway
But it's not just birds and animals that keep crew members at Changi busy.
The frequent plane landings and take-offs at Changi mean a significant amount of rubber deposits are left on the runway.
These rubber deposits could reduce runway friction and thereby cause an unsteady landing.
Enter the rubber removal machine, which sports two 'wheels' in its front that blast pressurised jets of water onto the runway's surface to dislodge rubber deposits.
The loosened rubber deposits are later sucked up to the waste tank of the Rubber Removal machine.
And of course --after the rubber deposits have been swept off the runway, that leaves just about everything else, really.
The aptly-named Runway Sweeper works like a vacuum cleaner to suck up dust, dirt and everything else in-between.
It also has a magnetic bar mounted horizontally that is able to pick up and remove metal objects from the runway.
The Friction Tester
And the last thing each runway needs before a plane is ready to land on it? A friction tester.
Though it looks like a regular car, the friction tester has an in-built water tank that allows it to apply a thin film of water onto the surface of the runway.
The water is applied in front of a measuring wheel, which then tests the friction on the runway's surface, which is essential for a safe landing or take-off.
So the next time you're sitting onboard a plane, just remember the many people and machines that go into keeping your ride safe.
Yvette is a Viral Content Reporter at Mashable Asia. She was previously reporting for BBC's Singapore bureau and Channel NewsAsia.
