Yesterday a plane that had taken off from New York City was forced to make an emergency water landing shortly after take off. The reason given? "Bird-strike" on both engines minutes after takeoff. It seems quite likely that the cause was truly a collision between a flock of birds and the plane. But does it really make sense to call it "bird-strike?" Canada Geese, the type of bird mostly likely to have been involved, fly about 40 mph. The takeoff speed of an Airbus 320 is 170mph, its cruising speed above 500mph, and the plane was presumably somewhere between these two speeds when the collision happened. So the plane was probably going five to ten times as fast as the birds.
So saying that the birds "slammed into the plane" as some news sources have done is akin to saying, "the pedestrians slammed into the speeding tanker truck." The birds were relatively stationary and the plane plowed through them. All the humans survived. The birds got the worst of it. Not to imply that the people on the plane were at fault. Perhaps the pilot's instruments don't even register anything as small and dispersed as a flock of geese. But really, does it make sense to blame the geese?
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I'm not sure that blame is at play. Why not read "bird-strike" as purely descriptive? I agree that the phrase is open to quibbling as to whether it's the best option, linguistically, for the descriptive purpose it is being used for. But geese aren't being disparaged in this story, not that I can tell. (And some of my best friends are geese!)
The problem with using the phrase is that it colors our thinking about the causality involved. If we think of it as the birds hitting the plane, our response is to think about how to make the birds stop doing that. If we think of it in terms of planes plowing into relatively stationary clouds of geese, that guides us toward a more constructive question: how do we change the technology in the planes so that won't happen any more.
Yes, but the phrase "bird-strike" does not, to me at least, particularly imply that the birds were doing the striking. I can just as easily read it as shorthand for "birds are what we are striking." And anyway, the people who have any vague probability of spending any time thinking about how to change airplane technology so as to avoid plowing into relatively stationary clouds of geese won't be confused by the possible awkwardness of the phraseology "bird-strike." They are the pilots and aeronautic engineers who know full well that the plane is the thing doing the striking, and they have a fairly vested interest in developing technologies that allow airplanes to land in places that are not the Hudson River. So even if the phrase "colors our thinking," I doubt that will have any negative impact on how the issue is addressed in practical terms.
But Jon-
It is not ultimately the engineers who decide what technology is installed on the aircraft. Politicians will at some point look at the problem of "bird strike" and say, "now what measures are necessary to keep those nasty birds from smashing into our planes?"
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