Foreign Object Damage - Examples

Examples

Examples of FOD include:

• Aircraft parts, rocks, broken pavement, ramp equipment, and vehicle parts: Damage usually occurs when the aircraft is taking off or landing. The intake suction from a jet engine is powerful enough to suck up loose material lying on the runway, and the winds created by a helicopter or prop-driven aircraft's rotors or by a jet blast can send such objects airborne, creating hazards to nearby personnel. One way to counter this is to install a gravelkit, which exist for certain planes like the early Boeing 737.
• Parts from ground vehicles
• Garbage, maintenance tools, etc. mistakenly or purposely deposited on tarmac and/or runway surfaces.
• Hail: can break windshields and damage or stop engines.
• Ice on the wings, propellers, or engine intakes
• Dust or ash clogging the air intakes (as in sandstorms in desert operating conditions or ash clouds in volcanic eruptions). For helicopters, this is also a major problem during a brownout.
• Tools, bolts, metal shavings, lockwire, etc. mistakenly left behind inside aircraft during the manufacturing process or maintenance.

Generally speaking, bird strikes (when an aeroplane flies into a bird, the impact can cause severe damage from a bird striking the fuselage, engine, etc.) are not considered to be FOD strikes, unless the bird or wildlife was already dead and lying on the operating surface when the strike occurred. Bird strikes are treated separately.

All aircraft occasionally lose small metal or carbon parts during takeoff and landing. These parts remain on the runway and can cause damage to tires of other aircraft, hit the fuselage or windshield/canopy, or get sucked up into an engine. Although airport ground crews regularly clean up runways, the crash of Air France Flight 4590 demonstrated that accidents can still occur: in that case, the crash was said to have been caused by debris left by a flight that had departed only four minutes earlier.

On aircraft carriers, as well as military and some civilian airfields, sweeps are conducted before flight operations begin. A line of crewmen walk shoulder to shoulder along the flight operations surfaces, searching for and removing any foreign objects. The objects removed are often also referred to as "FOD" although they have not caused any damage. In this context a more appropriate translation of the acronym would be "foreign objects and debris".