F.O.D damage question

[AEROMONKEY]

As part of our Safety management system here in CYQT we evaluate different topics every meeting....the issue of F.O.D (Foreign object Debris) is up for this meeting.
My question to you is... Have you ever had an aircraft damaged by F.O.D? If so what was it? and what was damaged?
Any and all replies would be great! thanks for the help!

[HiLo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590

Never experienced it personally, but if you're looking for evidence that it can cause disasters...

[roscoe]

Where to begin to answer that one.....Prop blades, fan and compressor blades, horizontal stab L/E, elevators, anything sticking out of the bottom of the fuselage ie; anti-collision lights, antennae, breather/vent tubes, cooling fan inlets, apu shrouds. They all get whacked at one time or another, and all the silicone, polymer tape, and homemade guards and shields don't help much. And btw it is not always the gravel that does the deed.

[ahramin]

I ran over a ratchet strap with the lawn mower last week. Surprised at how well it turned out (the mower, not the ratchet strap).

[CpnCrunch]

I talked to a very embarrassed guy just after he landed - he had left his ipad sitting on his float and took off, then realised what he had done and landed. A Westjet dash-8 then took off and blew the thing up into the air (but luckily no damage), and they were notified after takeoff by FSS.

I'm not entirely sure why FSS didn't tell Westjet to abort the takeoff. Perhaps the guy wasn't sure it was on the runway until it got blown into the slipstream of the Q400's engines.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Flat tire on a C 172. Tire had a No 8 embedded in it.

Dented wing leading edge after a step ladder left on the ground was blown up into it by prop wash

[J31]

Ingested at least 3 Arctic Tern's in one engine on approach. Flamed out and took out a $70,000 first stage impeller of a TPE331 Garrett. Covered by FOD insurance.

[YYCAME]

Kind of a vague question but obviously bird strikes are the most common or rock damage if you fly into gravel strips. Well maybe not, close second would be baggage carts, service vehicles ramming aircraft on the gates. What comes to mind from the last year was a bald eagle denting in the leading edge of an CRJ 200 pretty good and crane/stork caving in a radome on a DH8 with the legs sort of splayed around the nose. Changed a main wheel last year on a DH8 flat from glass picked up on the Fort McMurray runway. A few years back there was a tool ingestion after an engine change that pretty much wrote off the new engine I'm told on a CRJ 705. Then there are the breakaways due to things like I'm told unbled brakes where DH8's mow down GPU's or just bad conditions where CRJ's break away on an ice covered ramp during power runs and slide 50 ft into pickups.

[seniorpumpkin]

I'm not sure that birds count as F.O.D.
Don't know what we picked up, but the #3 engine on our Dash 7 was acting weird when we tried to leave Kandahar last year. Taxied off the runway, called maintenance. They found tons of bent compressor blades. It was hard to believe that an engine inlet nearly 11ft off the ground could suck something up, but we landed with no problem.

[iflyforpie]

One I heard of from my Flightcraft days. Centre engine on a '27. Probably apocryphal and embellished over the years.... but still a good one.

Daily inspection item number 21 on the 727: You empty all of your pockets, dig all of the rivet tails and lockwire out of the soles of your shoes, get a ten foot step ladder, prop it astride the aft air stairs, open the inlet hatch, climb in, and run up the S duct as fast as you can to reach the vortex generators before you slide back down and get the PT2 probe up your ass. Emerge from the inlet and make sure there is no ice/tools/human bodies/or anything else on top of the fuselage that will be sucked up and cause the engine to require a C1/C2 fan change last minute while middle management starts screaming stuff that makes Gunnery Sgt. Hartman seem like Mary Poppins.

Well.... I guess someone was too fat/lazy/didn't have enough time/couldn't find a serviceable ladder and item 21 got missed. They looked from the ground.... and from the wing and everything looked a-ok.

Turns out there was a piece of rubber matting some painter left up there after touching up screw heads or something.... ....totally invisible from the Tarmac. Crew flashed her up, gave her a bit of juice, and that rubber mat was gobbled up. It made the first turn in the S duct, but it didn't make the second turn and did a whole pile of damage to the inlet as well as FOD'd out the engine. Who's initials are on the sheet? You're screwed now!


There is something to be said about working on planes with spinny parts behind other pieces that can come off. I remember sitting on a wing, putting screws mundanely into a wing fairing on a '27 and one of the licensed guys asked me if the screw lengths were correct. Too long, they would puncture the dome nuts and cause pressurization leaks. Too short, and well... he pointed at the left hand pod engine. Remember, even though this plane has been in a D check for months, it needs to work when it is going Mach .88 at 30,000 ft... make sure it's put together right.....

[Chris M]

Found an entire blade from the snowblower at YSH a handful of years ago. Fortunately not on the runway, but it was a hefty chunk of steel. Would have made a hell of a bang when it left the machine, and another one if the mower found it.

[YYCAME]

I'm not sure that birds count as F.O.D.

Sure birds are FOD, especially if they are migrant birds

[Big Pistons Forever]

From a Boeing Maintenance Manual:

Foreign object debris (FOD) at airports includes any object found in an inappropriate location that -- as a result of being in that location -- can damage equipment or injure airplane or airport personnel. The resulting damage is estimated to cost the aerospace industry $4 billion a year. Airports, airlines, and airport tenants can reduce this cost by taking steps to prevent airport FOD.FOD includes a wide range of material, including loose hardware, pavement fragments, catering supplies, building materials, rocks, sand, pieces of luggage, and even wildlife. FOD is found at terminal gates, cargo aprons, taxiways, runways, and run-up pads. It causes damage through direct contact with airplanes, such as by cutting airplane tires or being ingested into engines, or as a result of being thrown by jet blast and damaging airplanes or injuring people.

[iflyforpie]

Another one from my Flightcraft days.... personal this time and 100% true and factual... seems the memory is getting faded as the years go by.

Convair 580. GTC. For those of you who don't know what a GTC is, it's basically an APU for bleed air only (Gas Turbine Compressor), no electrical power. The GTC-85 is actually almost identical to the GTCP-85.. the P being for Power.

Anyways... 375 hour check or whatever BS they called it... we are going to get the apprenti to do the inspections, that way we don't find as many things wrong and we can get the plane on its way. Anyways, here I am in the number 2 nacelle.. under the mighty Allison 501-D13.. trying to sandwich my flashlight and mirror into the upward facing air intake that has a roof over it to prevent random objects from dropping straight down into it. I was supposed to be inspecting the intake plenum.

Anyways.... I try to get comfortable tippy toeing on a step ladder while ducking my head and contorting my arms and lo and behold... I see a stud with no nut on it! Awesome! I don't see a bunch of expensive corn flakes in the housing so it must have just been forgotten. Off to kill a few hours generating an additional work card, filling out the control dock paperwork, researching the parts book, getting a new nut, wandering around aimlessly.... before I have to get back into my Cirque de Solei-esque position.

Get back there and very carefully with nut pinched between two non-opposing digits try to get it threaded on.... PING! Crap! Guess what...?It's now at the bottom of the housing where I can't reach it... and it's non magnetic stainless steel of course. Back in those days, if you wanted a borescope you basically had to sign your life away to get the five figure one from the tool crib which had its own cart..... so it was fishing blindly with lockwire and grabbers for what seemed like hours. I got it so the lockwire was through the nut and through a drain hole at the bottom... so I worked it up the wire with a grabber. Took a look at it... it was really old and beat up... not the nut I got from stores... this was the nut that fell off and had been rattling around in there for who knows how long. Once we got some licensed eyes in there... we could see that every impeller blade was damaged from this nut repeatedly being ingested.. but it was too big to get past the first stage.

Anyways... fished the other nut out, threaded it on with locktite, torqued it, and it was good to go. Engine shop guy didn't seem too concerned about the compressor damage... and it's just for ground use anyways....

[JayVee]

Broke out a couple miles back on the b/c to RWY 25 in YQT a few years ago. It was snowing and the ploughs were keeping busy. Tower reported that one of the trucks that just vacated the runway lost a wheel assembly on the runway between Charlie and Delta taxiways, and asked if we were okay to land.
(way before you worked there AM)

[Popol]

We had to tow out one aircraft to get the second one out.

One guy was working on it and left a pair of 90 degrees long nose (beefy one) on one of the tire. The plier had black handle and we never saw them. It punctured a brand new tire

I can think of numerous rock damage on dash8 operated on gravel strip.

The adf antenna on the q400 never lasted too long when operating on gravel strip. 3-4 weeks at most

[TheCheez]

Had a friendly 767 ingest the glass cover of a runway light that wasn't properly secured while I was an operations guy for the Canadian det at a foreign field.

The engine held up surprisingly well, numerous dings and dents on the fan but nothing that couldn't be buffed to within limits. There were a few tiny pieces of the light recovered but it was mostly dust.

[FOD_Vacuum]

[Big Pistons Forever]

If this had happened in YYZ the last words on the CVR would be from the guy on the ramp in front of the airplane and would be "clear to start No 1"

[Heliian]

I've seen engines that have sucked parts of their own intake in. One a small anchor nut that went all the way through and went unnoticed until inspection and another one that tried to eat a steel wash fitting along with some aluminium. The aluminium flew out of the bleed valve in shavings and the steel fitting was just bouncing off the first stage hacking the blades down to jagged razors. The pilot had heard a whine(no, no too much sidetone) on shutdown and decided to check it out, he thought that the metal shavings all over the engine compartment were odd and wisely called us.

Then there are the birdstrikes, class of their own really.

I'm assuming stationary objects don't count.

[oldtimer]

A cargo Falcon 20 deserved the nickname "Hoover" for it's habit of sucking up FOD. Sucked up a box, had a repair crew in to fix the problem. They finished repairs and sucked up a box during the post repair runup. Not a good day.
Had a rampie polishing the engine cowls on a Metro. Stuffed used paper towels in the engine intake for safe keeping but forgot them. Crew started the engine and sent paper shards out the tailpipe. Engine survived OK.
Taxiied a Cheyenne across a soft?? snow windrow left by snowplowes except the windrows were not soft and were high enough to destroy a propeller.
Bringing the oil temperatures up on a Norseman on skiis when a large dog decided the propeller need a big bite. Prop and cowl/engine was a mess but survived. The dog did not.