A Royal Air Maroc Boeing 747-400 made an emergency landing shortly after take off from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Sunday evening. An engine failed; the probable cause was a collision with birds. No one was injured but the incident was a bit of a shock to passengers.

The Air Maroc plane, with 62 passengers and crew on board, took off at 21:10 local time on a regular flight to Nador in Morocco. An Air Maroc spokesperson says a number of birds flew into the engine while the plane was taking off. One of the Dutch passengers says, "I saw the engine explode and smoke was pouring out of the engine on the left-hand side".

Fear
Air traffic control at Schiphol cleared a route for the plane to make an emergency landing; the route took the aircraft over the nearby city of Haarlem. The plane was flying at an extremely low altitude and many eyewitnesses said they thought it was going to crash. One eyewitness said, "It was flying extremely low and the pilot was dumping kerosene, you could see it as a sort of trail behind the plane. There was a sort of mist in the street that the plane flew over and smoke pouring out of the back.”

Scarecrows
Schiphol Airport, along with other every other airport in the world, spends a great deal of time and energy attempting to frighten birds, in order to prevent incidents like the one on Sunday evening from happening. Over the last few years, airport authorities have utilised a variety of methods, including scarecrows, laser beams, air pistols and noisemakers, to keep geese and other birds at least 10 kilometres away from the airport.

Schiphol says the number of collisions with birds rose from 4.4 to 7.1 per 10,000 flights in 2009. The number of birds around the airport has increased due to the unusually wet spring weather.

Collisions with birds seldom lead to fatal crashes. The last one was in 1996 when a military C-130 Hercules transport plane flew through a flock of starlings on its final descent. The plane crashed and killed 34 passengers.