“Bird strikes to commercial aircraft pose both a financial and safety risk. Safety engineers at Boeing are interested in ways to minimize both. This often involves understanding the most damaging strikes. Anytime an object collides with another object, there is kinetic energy. It follows that this is true when birds strike aircraft. Visualizing the kinetic energy involved in bird strikes using Tableau allowed Boeing safety engineers to locate damaging strikes to specific areas on the aircraft quickly and effectively, and determine where in the air they were occurring. This visualization was and is still being adjusted to analyze strikes to specific areas on the plane. Plotting kinetic energy in the flight envelope (Height vs. Speed) was a novel approach that is now being applied to non-birdstrike incidents.”

Tableau And Boeing: Visualizing Bird Strike Data