Bees on a Plane Are A Real-Life Problem Vexing Some Pilots
The Wall Street Journal
They Like Yellow and Jet Fuel And Are Riled by Black; Big Buzz in the Southwest
By NICK TIMIRAOS
August 16, 2006; Page A1
As pilot Brian Murphy prepared for a quick flight from Burbank's Bob Hope Airport to San Francisco in May, his ground crew alerted him to a problem on his Beechcraft King Air 200: A five-foot-wide blanket of bees was draped over the plane's left engine cover. And many bees were finding their way into an engine compartment and even into the cockpit. "I was just shocked," says the 36-year-old charter pilot, who raced to shut the cockpit's open vent windows. "Within just 20 minutes there were thousands of bees that had moved onto the exhaust area." He considered turning on the engines to shoo away the swarm but decided that that might make matters worse by agitating the bees.
The bewildered crew didn't know what to do, either, but the Burbank Airport Fire Department knew the drill. "I could hear them yell down into their fire shack, 'It's time to go spray the bees again,' " recalls Steven Schell, the general manager for Mercury Air Center-Burbank. Firefighters hosed off the King Air 200 with an insecticide foam that suffocates bees. "They were dropping straight to the ground, whole big chunks of them," Mr. Murphy remembers. The bees inside the engine cover, meanwhile, came crawling out through the inner lip once the foam hit the plane. "Once they started spraying, those bees weren't ever able to fly," he says. Then the pilots vacuumed up three dozen bees that had entered the cockpit.
"Snakes on a Plane" may be the hot horror movie of the summer, but bees on planes are creating the most buzz in some aviation circles. Africanized honey bees -- the infamous "killer bees" -- are increasingly making unscheduled layovers at airports across the Southwest. The aggressive bees, which entered the U.S. from Mexico in the early 1990s, like to travel across open spaces and stop to rest whenever the queen gets tired. Airports have few trees or other natural rest stops. That makes planes, jetways, baggage-loading equipment, terminals and parking garages popular for stopovers.
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That is creating scenes like one that unfolded at Love Field in Dallas last April. Gordon Guillory, a 39-year-old Southwest Airlines mechanic, knew something wasn't right when he arrived at the hangar for his shift: A buzzing noise was coming not from the engine but from the tail of the Boeing 737-700. "You really couldn't see them, but you knew there were tons of them in there because there were so many that would fly out," he says. "I've been working on airplanes for 15 years and I've never, ever seen anything like it." The mechanics watched from a safe distance as the beekeeper smoked out and vacuumed up the bees. When the beekeeper started banging on a compartment in the tail to chase out the swarm, the mechanics became even more agitated. "The guys started yelling at him. You just can't do that. You could damage the plane," Mr. Guillory explains. Scents and colors also attract the bees. At an airport, that can lead bees to cluster on a turboprop that's been recently cleaned with lemon air-freshener. "For whatever reason, they seem to like the smell of jet fuel, and especially the yellow color of the Southwest airplane," says Judy Alexander, senior director of operations at Tucson International Airport.
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While bees don't pose a serious threat to planes, bee experts advise against the temptation to use the engines to suck in and kill a swarm of the uninvited passengers. Bees carry a small amount of honey with them when they travel, and if a jet engine ingested a swarm, "it could do some damage," says George Botta, a Las Vegas exterminator who serves on Nevada's Board of Agriculture. "It's not as bad as hitting a flock of birds, but it'd be like pouring a tank of honey into the engine."
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