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Over the weekend, a Southwest Airlines flight was forced to turn back for an emergency landing after an incident where the plane is believed to have experienced bird strikes to an engine and the aircraft’s nose, according to an . 

But, what is a bird strike? And how do we reduce the risk of bird strikes?

Syed A.M. Shihab, Ph.D., assistant professor in �鶹ӰԺ State's College of Aeronautics and Engineering, shared his insight on bird strikes in a previous article, “What’s the Big Idea? Birds and Drones.”

Shihab established that bird strikes are simply collisions between birds and aircraft. When it comes to preventing these unfortunate incidents, it lies in technology and studying bird movement.

“Now sadly, bird strikes have resulted in many non-fatal and fatal accidents in aviation since its beginning. So we need to minimize the risk of bird strikes,” Shihab said. “One way we can do this is by modeling and predicting the bird movement using cutting edge AI and machine learning models based on the bird movement data collected using avian and weather radars.” 

Watch the full video to hear Shihab’s insights.

Read the full . 

Check out the “What’s The Big Idea?” featuring Shihab.