So apparently, birds crashing into airplanes isn’t just something they make disaster movies about - it’s a real problem. Like billion-dollar damage and injuries real. Yeah. Those majestic flocks you see? They’ve caused more than $1.2 billion in damage to aviation worldwide. In the U.S. alone, we’re talking tens of thousands of bird strikes over a couple decades that wrecked aircraft and even killed people.
Airports have tried everything under the sun to shoo these feathered daredevils away - from lasers and flares to distress calls, inflatable scarecrows, shotgun sounds, and even real birds of prey. But birds are apparently way too smart for this stuff. They get used to it. They come back. Or they just move to a different part of the runway and give you the same problem somewhere else. Basically, birds have the attention span of a teenager on TikTok.
So what’s the next brilliant idea? Drones. Yes, those little quadcopters most of us use to annoy our neighbors. A team of scientists led by aerospace researcher Soon-Jo Chung at Caltech figured out that maybe if you don’t just spook birds but actually guide them, you could keep them out of airport airspace. This idea was inspired, naturally, by the infamous 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson,” when a flock of Canadian geese brought down both engines of a passenger jet. That turned out okay that one time, but apparently nobody wants to make that a trend.
Instead of launching RC planes that sort of look like predators (and require pilots with eagle vision and even sharper reflexes), the team decided it was 2018 and we should automate things. So they taught a drone to behave like the world’s least intimidating sheepdog - but for birds.
Here’s where things get geeky - in a good way. The team didn’t just fly around waving their drones like a startled air traffic controller. They built mathematical models of how birds fly in flocks and react to threats - starting with how bird flocks naturally stick together (think synchronized swimmers, but airborne and with feathers).
From there, they borrowed ideas from sheep herding algorithms and turned them into something that works in three dimensions, not just across a field. The goal was to figure out how to position a drone so birds on the edge of a flock would decide, “Yeah, let’s go that way instead,” and the rest would follow. Crucially, they didn’t want the birds to panic and scatter like a dropped bucket of popcorn - that just makes everything worse.
In test flights over fields in Daejeon, South Korea, they successfully used a single quadcopter to influence flocks of egrets and loons to veer off away from a designated space. The experiment even had another drone overhead just to film the chaos - er, science. Best results came when the herding drone approached in a chill, non-threatening way. Zoom at full speed, and the birds flicked up vertically like… well, birds under stress.
Yes, the team basically proved that you can use a drone to politely guide a flock of birds in a new direction without it turning into an airborne mosh pit. One drone can do this, as long as the flock isn’t gigantic. And researchers think that if you want to scale this up - say, to deal with multiple flocks or bigger flocks - you’ll need more drones and more sophisticated systems.
There’s just one tiny bureaucratic hiccup: drones are generally not allowed near airports. So unless airports are cool with having robots bossing birds around (and maybe file some paperwork), this might stay more of a lab thing than a runway necessity.
Now here’s where reality checks back in. Drone herding is impressive, no doubt-but it’s not always practical when you’re dealing with large, established flocks that have already decided an area is home. This is where Avitrol still earns its seat at the table, especially long term.
Unlike drones, Avitrol doesn’t need flight permissions, battery life, or perfect weather. It works by leveraging natural bird behavior-when a few birds react, the entire flock gets the message. That makes it far more scalable when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of birds instead of a small, cooperative group that’s feeling polite that day.
There’s also the consistency factor. Birds eventually learn patterns. Drones fly predictable paths. Airports and industrial sites have schedules. Avitrol, when used properly and legally, introduces unpredictability, which birds absolutely hate. And that’s exactly why it remains effective over time.
So while drones may be the future for guiding birds out of specific airspace in controlled scenarios, Avitrol continues to be one of the most reliable tools for breaking flock loyalty altogether-especially in environments where birds keep coming back no matter how many new gadgets you throw at them.
In other words: drones are impressive. Avitrol is practical. And when the flock is big enough, practicality usually wins.