Two Things: Pilot backs decision to hunt deer at Smith Reynolds; Too hot for policing, at least in the office (2024)

Rick Williams could see the collision coming.

A veteran pilot, Williams was flying into Burlington and coming in for a landing. He was returning from a trip to the coast in 2014 - Beaufort or Morehead City he thinks, the quick trips kind of run together - and saw a small herd of deer scamper across the runway.

“Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the lone straggler,” he said. “At that point, I was traveling about 100 knots - about 115 mph - and hit the deer.”

“Fortunately at that speed, if the deer had made it another 6 inches, it would have collapsed the (landing) gear on that side. And that would have sent us cartwheeling down the runway.

“It could have been worse. A lot worse.”

Plenty of people collide with deer every year. Turkeys and bears, too. But they’re behind the wheel of an automobile - not in a cockpit and certainly not on a runway.

We thought to mention this only after a rubber stamp, no debate and unanimous decision by City Council to temporarily waive an ordinance prohibiting the discharge of firearms within city limits so that federal wildlife officers can cull nuisance deer (and turkeys) at Smith Reynolds Airport.

It’s a formality, but required to stay within the bounds of the law. And the Council has done so every year since 2019.

“I think it is pretty urgent,” airport director Mark Davidson told officials when debating that first controlled hunt. “We are observing wildlife and (we) get calls to chase them off.”

There are conditions, of course.

Wildlife officers will use rifles rather than bows, muzzleloaders, pistols or shotguns loaded with slugs. They’ll use fire suppressors — silencers — so as not to scare the pants off neighbors, some of whom are already terrorized by regular gunfire.

So far, so good.

But doubters remain. Kind-hearted souls who wonder whether dropping Bambi is absolutely necessary and quietly have questioned the actual threat posed by deer.

Davidson has told city officials that, yes, deer have damaged aircraft and that pilots have needed to abort takeoffs because of wildlife on the runway.

Before the Council allowed that first hunt, one concerned citizen - bless her heart - asked in the mandatory public hearing if there were another way. Like, say, tranquilizing and relocating them.

Um, no, said Jimmy Capps, a wildlife biologist who attended that meeting in the event of such a question.

“The reason we can’t tranquilize them is because of the possibility of spreading disease,” Capps said. “North Carolina Wildlife Resources will not allow us to move deer.”

Until now - and it took a routine 10-second renewal of an old motion to jog our memory - few have heard first-person testimony about the consequences of inaction.

So we phoned Williams, happily retired to the foothills of Virginia, to hear his opinion on controlled hunts.

“Something that I certainly think needs to be done,” he said. “What are you going to do? Poison them? That’d be inhumane. It sounds crazy but that’s a fact of life with airports like Smith Reynolds.”

His experience at the Burlington-Alamance Regional Airport speaks volumes, too.

(The collision, by the way, prompted officials at the Burlington-Alamance Regional Airport to build a 10-foot fence topped with barbed wire in 2015.)

As soon as Williams hit it - or more specifically, the deer collided with his plane - he keyed his radio, he said, and called out “61 Kilo. Deer strike.”

Coincidentally, N.C. wildlife officers kept an office at the airport so when they heard “deer strike” they came to investigate.

And Williams, having grown up in Louisiana hunting and fishing, posed a simple question to them.

“‘What are you going to do with it? I’d really like to have it,’” Williams asked.

If it was all the same to them, he planned on eating it. No sense letting good venison go to waste.

Bemused wildlife officers wrote out what’s called a “salvage tag” in case he was stopped with a deer in the back of his truck on the way home.”

He kept a yellow copy in his office, an odd souvenir from a very unusual - and very fortunate - incident. But after he retired in 2015, he lost track of it.

“Now when I tell people the story about hitting a deer with my plane,” Williams said, “they always ask ‘Was it a reindeer?’”

Heat halts some services

GREENSBORO - Everyone who’s ventured outdoors for more than 10 seconds in the last day or two knows it’s hot. Dripping sweat is a tell.

We live in North Carolina and it’s August. No surprises there.

But what is mildly surprising - amusing, too - is that it's too hot for police work. Not for working cops, the ones in full-body armor humping calls.

Rather, it’s too hot for the brass and office dwellers. The Greensboro Police Department announced Thursday that HQ is closed until further notice for “facility maintenance.”

In practical terms, that means the HVAC is on the fritz. And no air-conditioning, in this soup, is no good.

So for the timing being, the top brass will decamp to Krispy Kreme.

Kidding.

GPD did say that the lobby of police HQ will be closed to all public business and that fingerprinting - for background checks not suspected criminals - is suspended.

Some police personnel are still working in the building, the mercury be damned, to support normal operations.

Be careful out there. It’s warm.