Firms Vie for FAA FOD Detection Contract | Aviation International News

Firms Vie for FAA FOD Detection Contract

Xsight FODetect sensor at Boston Logan.

By John Sheridan

October 1, 2012

It could have been the most expensive ball bearing the Marines had ever bought. A team of 50 Marines, moving in slow, shoulder-to-shoulder search patterns for more than an hour, had located seven of a set of eight half-inch-diameter ball bearings that fell from a vehicle at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Ariz. The eighth was proving elusive. It was somewhere on the parking area used by Yuma’s four AV-8B V/STOL Harrier squadrons, and it had to be found, because the AV-8B’s voracious appetite for air sucked through the large intake of its Pegasus engine makes the airplane especially vulnerable to foreign object debris (FOD) during vertical operations. Sucked into the Harrier’s engine intake during a full-power vertical climb, the small, hardened-steel bearing could destroy the jet’s $4 million Pegasus in seconds.

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