The man who knows best what birds can do to a passenger jet today called New York City's plan to build a garbage transfer station near La Guardia Airport "terrible."
Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 after geese took out the jet's engines, said the garbage station should be moved.
"One of the things we've learned is that one of the few ways to mitigate the bird problem is to not put anything near an airport runway that's likely to attract birds," Sullenberger said on CBS' "Early Show." "And so putting a trash facility this close to one of the busiest runways in the nation just doesn't make sense. It's really a terrible idea. It should be put much farther away."
"It's also located right on the water," added Sullenberger, now the network's aviation expert.
"Even an enclosed facility is going to attract birds. And so, by choosing to put this kind of facility so close, and they're relying on essentially Band-Aid kind of mitigations that we're hoping will be perfect -- you know, the real world is messier than that. There will be some trash that we spill that may not clean up right away. Birds are smart, and they'll learn there's a source of food there."
The Post reported Monday that the Federal Aviation Administration shrank a "protection zone" surrounding a La Guardia runway by 800 feet so the city could legally build its 100-foot-tall trash transfer station on the College Point, Queens, waterfront.
