PATNA, India — An Air India flight suffered a suspected bird strike near its right engine while landing at Jay Prakash Narayan International Airport on August 24, the second bird-strike incident at the airport within a week.
Flight AI 1741, arriving from Delhi with 164 passengers, landed safely at 7:43 a.m. after the pilot reported the suspected strike to air traffic control while on approach, according to a PTC News report. Airport authorities activated emergency landing protocol as a precaution, positioning fire service personnel near the runway before touchdown. A post-landing inspection confirmed the bird strike but found no engine damage. After completing mandatory safety checks, the aircraft was cleared for its return flight to Delhi, departing 79 minutes behind schedule with 160 passengers aboard. A runway inspection followed the incident.
A More Serious Strike a Week Earlier
The August 24 event followed a more damaging bird strike on a different Air India flight operating the same Delhi-Patna route on August 17. That aircraft sustained damage severe enough to ground it for two days, requiring engineers to be flown in from Delhi to complete repairs before it could return to service. Two bird strikes on the same route at the same airport within a week — one requiring multi-day repairs — is enough to raise questions about whether the airport’s wildlife-hazard management is keeping pace with local bird activity.
Why Repeated Strikes at One Airport Matter
A single bird strike is a routine, well-managed hazard in commercial aviation; most cause no damage, as the August 24 event demonstrated. But repeated ingestion events at the same airport in rapid succession typically point to a specific wildlife-management gap — inadequate habitat control near the runway, a seasonal bird migration pattern not yet accounted for in the airport’s hazard plan, or insufficient dispersal measures — rather than simple bad luck. Engine damage from a bird strike scales unpredictably: most strikes cause nothing, but a bird ingested into the wrong part of a fan blade at the wrong moment can cause the kind of damage the August 17 aircraft sustained.
Patna’s cluster is not an isolated data point. FODNews has tracked a sharp rise in wildlife strikes across Indian airports, with more than 1,782 bird-strike incidents reported nationwide in 2025 — a trend that has pushed airport wildlife management onto the regulatory agenda well beyond Patna. Wildlife hazards are one of several airspace-safety categories, alongside foreign-object risks like the kite-string hazard that has disrupted flights near Ahmedabad, that Indian aviation regulators have flagged for closer monitoring.
Indian aviation authorities and airport wildlife-control teams typically respond to strike clusters with intensified habitat surveys, updated bird-dispersal schedules, and closer coordination with air traffic control on reported sightings. Neither Air India nor Patna airport officials have publicly detailed additional wildlife-mitigation steps following the second strike as of this writing.
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