Thursday, October 01, 2009

Birds, Guns and Cops!

I spent the day yesterday at the Burlington Airport for a seminar put on by the USDA and NCDOT Aviation Division. They invited all the airport managers in the area to attend to learn about managing the hazards of animals on the airport/runways.

As you all know, bird strikes on airplanes can be a very bad thing!

After several hours of inside presentations, we got to the fun stuff!

We went out to a vacant area on the airport for the "pyrotechnics display". This basically just means shooting these noise-makers to scare the birds away.

We all got to participate - here's a little revolver (made just for this purpose)



And here's the little single shot model.



The "bullets" come in boxes that look like firecrackers - with cartoons of birds being scared....



We also got to shoot a 12 gauge shotgun version. This was a real gun - the shells just had a noise maker that went off about 5 seconds after the shot so that it was about 100 ft in the air.



This is what the shotgun shell looked like - you can see the noisemaker inside the shell.


Beautiful day to be out making noise!


Hey, I can hang with the boys!!


Oh, about the cops....apparently, no one told the Burlington City Police Department that we would be discharging firearms at the airport today.......


Apparently they received several citizen reports....


They were very polite, but did inspect the "goodies" to make sure the USDA guys were telling the truth. After they left, one of the guys said "wonder what they would have done if we all took off running???".....I don't think we want to test that theory......

2 comments:

affectioknit said...

That does look like a fun shoot - I'm sure Scout would love it...

Love,

T

Miranda said...

Hahaha, if you guys all just took off running... =)