Posts about stuff relating to airports
ASW #3: Accident Review: FOD Brings Down the Concorde
The third day of Airport Safety Week sees one of the annual event’s most enduring activities - the FOD walk. As I am not currently working on an airport or in Australia, I am going to miss taking part this year. Instead, I thought I would offer an analysis of the 2000 Concorde disaster as it would have to be the most significant FOD-related accident in history.
The following analysis is very limited. I just want to focus on the presence of the FOD on the runway, its immediate impact on the aircraft and factors associated with FOD detection and prevention.
Header Image : (cc) Daniel Mennerich (via Flickr)
The Best Job in the World
I am overcome with the desire to gloat. I have, in my humble opinion, the best job in the world. Now this might be the exhaustion talking but this week has had a great mix of new experiences, further development in existing skills and a real sense of progress. The reason I'm exhausted is that my schedule this week has been chaotic. I've worked on average only 11 hours or so for each of the first three days this week but those hours have included evenings, mornings and a fair bit of back of the clock "flying".
FODtube.com*
Last week's post on Foreign Object Debris got me surfing youtube.com for some videos: First up is a short video on some of Denver Airport's FOD control activities - pretty low tech stuff but they appear happy with it.
Runways Made Safer? Yeah but…
I caught this story on the web last week. According to the press release (eh, I mean) article, aircraft are falling apart during take-off and landing and the frontline of defence, airport safety officers, are prone to error. Enter the saviour – FOD radar. Okay, that's a cruel, exaggerated (mis)representation.
I will admit that Foreign Object Debris (FOD) is a very real problem for aviation and airports, in particular. Skybrary puts the yearly cost at $4 billion per year (including wildlife) and the list of FOD-induced crashes is often headlined by the 2000 Concorde disaster.
It's the mis-characterisation of runway inspections that gets to me as it seems that the article is trying to paint the following picture:
Image credit: Darli Donizete (via Pexels)