Device and method for an aircraft bird congestion indicator system

A real-time aircraft bird congestion indicator system for providing bird-aircraft strike risk information to airport stakeholders including pilots, comprising:

• one or more radars configured to continuously survey a predetermined airspace throughout an entirety thereof and continuously generate bird tracks and aircraft tracks of birds and any number of aircraft in said airspace;
• and
• a congestion processor operatively connected to said one or more radars,
• said congestion processor being configured to receive said aircraft tracks and said bird tracks and process them together to periodically determine for each cell of a preselected multiplicity of cells or subspaces of said predetermined airspace a respective aircraft density and a respective bird density, collectively constituting an aircraft density function and a bird density function respectively over or across said predetermined airspace, and to generate a risk matrix that identifies aircraft bird strike risk in each of said cells or subspaces of said predetermined airspace separately,
• wherein said congestion processor includes a risk correlator configured to calculate said risk matrix by multiplying densities of all possible cell-pairs of the aircraft density function and the bird density function and multiplying these products by a proximity function that is inversely proportional to the respective cell-to-cell separation in the airspace.

A method for measuring congestion between aircraft and birds in a predetermined airspace in real-time to provide bird-aircraft strike risk information to airport stakeholders including pilots, comprising:

• operating one or more radars to continuously survey said predetermined airspace throughout an entirety thereof and continuously generate bird tracks of birds in said predetermined airspace and aircraft tracks of any number of aircraft in said predetermined airspace;
• operating a congestion processor to receive said aircraft tracks and said bird tracks from said one or more radars and to process them to periodically generate a risk matrix that measures bird-aircraft strike risk separately in each of a multiplicity of cells of said predetermined airspace;
• and
• periodically storing the risk matrix to build a historical database accessible for understanding bird-aircraft strike probabilities in said predetermined airspace in accordance with time.