Global Fastener News

Fastener Debris Poses Serious Airline Safety Risk

Jason Sandefur

MEDIA SPOTLIGHT
Editor’s Note: Articles in Media Spotlight are excerpts from publications or broadcasts that show the industry what the public is reading or hearing about fasteners and fastener companies.

Fasteners that have fallen off planes during takeoff, landing and taxiing pose a greater threat to airline safety than on the runway than aircraft collisions, new studies suggest.

Called FOD (foreign-object debris), loosened rivets, bolts and nuts from aircraft make up more than 50% of all FOD, which is found all over ramps, taxiways and runways at airports in the U.S, the Chicago Tribune reports.

“Debris as small as a pebble on a runway can be a potential hazard for planes, making the clearing of airfields both essential and a challenge,” writes Jon Hilkevitch of the Tribune.

This debris can be sucked into jet engines or slice through the thin aluminum skins of aircraft, potentially setting off catastrophic fuel-tank explosions.

Heightened concerns have spurred the Federal Aviation Administration to test high-tech ways to detect debris, which causes at least $1 billion in damage each year to commercial aircraft.

Runway debris causes damage to planes in about 70,000 incidents each year at the 300 largest airports in the world.

In 2000 an Air France supersonic Concorde jetliner ran over a metal strip at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The metal strip cut a tire on the Concorde during takeoff and rubber fragments from the tire ruptured fuel tanks, sparking a blaze that brought down the plane, killing all 109 people onboard and four people on the ground.

At O’Hare and Midway, the FAA reportedly will conduct tests of promising debris-detection radars mounted on trucks as well as “smart” cameras focused on runways.

“The mobile radar detector can find a quarter-inch nut from 500 feet away,” said Jim Patterson Jr., an FAA airport safety specialist who is managing the project.

The research is being done in collaboration with technology companies and the University of Illinois. It follows the successful deployment of automated debris-detection devices at airports in Singapore, Vancouver, Israel and elsewhere. The detectors undergoing tests are based on different systems that range from millimeter-wave radar to high-resolution infrared cameras.

“The FAA expects to approve several of the technologies, probably by early 2009,” writes Hilkevitch. “Large airports such as O’Hare may deploy more than one system, perhaps using a combination of mobile units on runways and fixed detectors positioned on the airfield.”

The new technology will replace current efforts of maintenance crews to visually inspect miles of runways or drag a mesh blanket across the pavement to pick up pebbles and other debris like bolts and screws. �2008 FastenerNews.com