The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has published a report detailing ground operations occurrences at Australian airports between 1998 and 2008. You can get the report here in PDF format. A couple of news sites have picked up on this report and have highlighted the dangers from FOD (here and here).
The report describes a worrying trend:
There were 116 FOD occurrences reported to the ATSB between 1998 and 2008 that affected high capacity air transport aircraft. The number of FOD occurrences has increased in a curvilinear fashion from 7 in 1998 to 26 in 2008.
It’s an excellent report, and has a section on FOD (just 4 pages) that not only describes the stats for the 10 year period, but also describes specific incidents. Although the report highlights the real dangers from FOD, it makes no mention at all of the existence of FOD detection systems.
