FOD-detection.com serves a very niche market, when you combine this with the fact that it is the only independent website that serves this market, you end up with a site that attracts some very unique visitors i.e. potential FOD detection customers. I don’t share the website statistics with anyone, but today I thought I would share some very basic/general data on where our visitors are located.
The pie chart below shows the location of visitors for the last month. So, what can we tell from the data? for one thing the data is skewed by visits from the FOD detection system vendors themselves. This might seem odd, as there are only 4 vendors, but you have to remember that there are also less than 10 customers worldwide, so it’s not actually very surprising. Of the top 5 countries, US, UK, Israel, China and Singapore, all but one (China) are home to a FOD detection vendor.
Even with the skew, it’s clear to see where most of the interest in FOD detection comes from, and it’s the US. This should come as no great surprise given the FAA circular, and the availability of FAA funding. Let’s just hope that we start to see some of this interest turn into sales sometime soon!
These large slices that refer to Israel and UK originated at the fact that both have companies that are developing FOD detection systems. Actually, when it comes to civil aviation the risk is minor, the maintainability and manageability of all systems are a head hack and the prices simply don’t make sense.
As I pointed out in the article, the system manufacturers are based in the US, UK, Israel and Singapore.
To say that they are “developing” systems I think is misleading, the fact is they have “developed” systems, they exist as products, and are installed at airports already. As for the cost of maintaining a FOD detection system, it is up to individual airports to do their own cost-benefit analysis, and the big unknown will be the cost due to FOD. For this information I would recommend the report published by Ian McCreary, as discussed here.