Logan Airport has documented more than 100 pieces of debris since January, said Ed Freni, director of aviation for Massport Authority.

“One is too much,” he said. “With this system, we’re able to get real-time information and respond immediately as opposed to doing a traditional runway test.”

FODetect was officially turned on in September. Freni said so far, the airport is pleased with the technology.

Regarding the cost, the article states:

The technology cost the airport about $1.7 million, according to Xsight. That’s cheaper than the usual $5 million-per-runway cost because the runway was shorter in length than most and because Logan is first to use the technology. The Federal Aviation Administration paid for half of the cost.

Source (The Boston Business Journal)

The Flightglobal* Blog Aerial View has posted an article on the successful use of the FODetect system at Ben Gurion Airport.

Here’s a quote from the article:

“The system had detected an enormous number of FODs, and this is a real revolution” – this statement was made yesterday by Udi Bar-Oz, deputy director general, operations of the Israeli Airports Authority.

Source (Flightglobal Blog – Aerial View)

* In the interest of full disclosure I should highlight the fact that I work for Flightglobal. But, I have no involvement with the Flightglobal Blogs, and, FOD-detection.com IS NOT a Flightglobal blog.

xsight (the company behind FODetect) has just introduced an enhancement to RunWize, called BirdWize.

I have to be honest here, it’s not entirely clear to me if RunWize is the same thing as FODetect, or if FODetect is the name of the hardware, and RunWize is the name of the system, and BirdWize is an addon to the system! If anyone can clarify I’d really appreciate it. Anyway….on with the news.

According to the website, RunWize (or FODetect, or maybe FODSpot) can now also detect birds. It’s not entirely clear from the product description what the technical change is, I can only assume that the detection algorithms have been updated to better detect moving objects e.g birds.

From the product page:

BirdWize uses advanced image processing and computer vision algorithms to detect birds on the runway without any manual intervention. The algorithms also provide indication regarding the bird’s estimated dimensions.

View the product page here.

FODetect (from Xsight) is declared fully operational at Tel-Aviv Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Mr Yair Gannot, Director of Aviation Safety, Israel Airports Authority, commented: “During the system operation and over the past nine months an average of six items per month were collected from the runway.  More so, we had no case of FOD found by our manual inspectors that was not earlier detected and visualized by the automated FOD detection system.

Source(AirportsInternational.com)