Their Job: Clear the Airfield

The warning was urgent.

“There’s a wheel from a tug rolling onto 25R,” cautioned an airline pilot over the radio at Los Angeles International Airport.

“It’s on the runway? What part?” asked a surprised air traffic controller, who scanned the airfield for the cart tire.

“It’s still rolling,” replied the pilot.

“OK, it’s still rolling,” repeated the controller, who by now spotted the 30-pound wheel, but could only watch helplessly from the tower as it skittered past a taxiway.

Seconds later, the tire lost momentum in a weed-filled ditch between two runways and toppled over in a cloud of dust.

The exchange crackled over the radio as Elaine Andrews, an operations superintendent at LAX, was skirting airplanes parked on the airport’s south side, searching for other debris.

She quickly wheeled her white van around to join other airport employees in the pursuit, arriving after one of them had already scooped up the 12-inch-diameter wheel.

“We usually have feast or famine,” Andrews said.

Andrews and 33 other airport employees, known to colleagues as the trash collectors of the airfield, prowl LAX 24 hours a day, seven days a week to scour it clean of anything that could cause damage to an aircraft.

The seemingly innocuous trash, known in aviation parlance as “foreign object debris” and commonly shortened to “FOD,” can be deadly.

On July 25, 2000, an Air France Concorde crashed on takeoff from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris after it hit a 17-inch metal strip from the engine of another plane.

The metal debris tore through one of the supersonic jet’s tires, sending shards of rubber into a fuel tank and causing a leak, which ignited. The accident killed 113.

Such catastrophic accidents caused by airfield debris are rare. More often, loose objects damage aircraft, costing the industry up to $4 billion each year, according to National Aerospace FOD Prevention Inc., a group formed by airlines, military officials and aircraft manufacturers.

Airport debris also poses a significant danger to ground crews. At Denver International Airport, a piece of baggage was rendered into shrapnel a few years ago after a strong wind blew it off a luggage cart, under a jet and in front of a running engine, which sucked it in and spewed it out the back.

“Pieces were found 90 feet behind the engine well,” said Hank Krakowski, a veteran pilot and vice president of safety, security and quality assurance for United Airlines. “They were well within the area that support personnel could have been. It literally could have been almost like a bullet to an individual.”

Every day, the LAX debris collectors gather about three bags of trash each, removing scores of loose objects, both living and inert, lying, or, in some cases, moving, on the airfield.

If it can be shipped in an airplane or packed in a suitcase, chances are it’s been found where it’s not supposed to be.

They have discovered a new, plastic-wrapped Jaguar sedan perched on a pallet in the middle of a service road and a box filled with yet-to-be-released reels of “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace” near a taxiway on the airport’s south side.

They have found vials of blood, bundles of Social Security checks, flowers, and crates of pythons, chicks, oysters, lobsters and turtles.

They have found more mundane items, such as the parts that drop from aircraft and the thousands of vehicles that service them.

Debris emerged as a major challenge at airports worldwide several decades ago when powerful jet engines were first installed on aircraft.

To create thrust, fans draw air into the engine with tremendous force. Once inside, the air is compressed, sprayed with fuel and lit. Burning gases expand and blast from the back of the engine, driving the plane forward.

The new engines were placed close to the ground, making it possible for them to pull in objects on airfields.

The machinery in a jet engine, including the fan blade and the compressor, is intricate and finely balanced, making it vulnerable to damage from objects that are not always easy to detect.

“It can take something as small as a battery to take out an engine,” said Frank Clark, executive director of the nonprofit organization that represents carriers operating at Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX. “Now a $1.98 flashlight battery just cost you $98,000. And that’s just in immediate costs.”

Jet engines can cost up to $15 million to replace.

Keeping airport debris under control requires a continuous, concerted effort by airlines, airports and vendors.

The problem is particularly acute at LAX, because of its relatively small size combined with the large amount of cargo it handles.

At 3,600 acres, LAX is half the size of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and one-tenth the size of Denver International Airport. But LAX is the world’s sixth-busiest airport for cargo traffic -- surpassed only by airports in Memphis, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Anchorage and Seoul.

“If you have a big house, you can be a little bit untidy because there are more places for it to go,” said Ray Jack, the airport operations supervisor at LAX. “But if you take it down to a 600-square-foot bungalow, there are less places to put it.”

Servicing 925 departing aircraft a day requires up to 30,000 trips by luggage carts and catering and cabin service trucks on service roads that cross taxiways and runways. Nuts, bolts, straps and other parts fall off these vehicles, creating hazards.

Workers also unload about 2 million tons of cargo a year from aircraft onto carts for a bumpy ride across the airport to other jets or to cargo facilities, where it’s loaded on trucks.

In their haste to deliver shipments on time, tug drivers sometimes dump part of their load.

There was the time a driver took a corner too fast, causing several boxes to bounce onto the asphalt and split open, spilling hundreds of golf balls and shutting down the main road on the airport’s south side for several hours.

“They were everywhere -- it looked like at least 500 golf balls,” recalled Vincent E. Murray, a superintendent of airport operations, who described airport officials in ties chasing down the lost cargo. “That to me was the funniest thing I had ever seen at the airport.”

Murray recounted the story as he drove a white Ford Crown Victoria around the airfield. As he looked for objects that could pose a threat to airplanes, he also kept an eye out for inbound and outbound jets.

“I’m like a long-tail cat in a roomful of rocking chairs,” he said, scanning the cloudless sky for airplanes before crossing a runway. “I’m constantly looking around.”

He asked his passengers if they get carsick, warning that his job requires frequent unusual maneuvers.

Then he swerved suddenly to the left, opened his door and picked up an object invisible to the untrained eye -- a dirty steel washer, depositing it into a plastic bag full of other recent finds.

Murray and many of his fellow debris-hunters are also pilots who fly small planes as a hobby and whose love of aviation led them into careers at LAX. Raised on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Murray’s fascination with flying began on frequent plane trips to visit his grandparents in Alabama.

“This is the best job you could ever have,” said Murray, as he drove down a narrow asphalt road between runways, scanning the nearby fields of sun-drenched yellow and orange gazanias for debris.

Hunting for stray objects takes up much of their time, but Murray and his co-workers have many other duties, including looking for cracked concrete, missing signs, broken fences and anything else that could be a hazard.

They also escort aircraft, supervise other agencies on the airfield, and conduct safety programs for airlines and other airport tenants.

They work closely with airlines and vendors to ensure they keep their areas clean and truck doors closed to prevent pillows, food and other service items from escaping.

United Airlines even has a formal program to remind employees to be aware of the problem. It holds a monthly contest at LAX to reward employees who find the most trash, the largest piece and the most unusual piece. Each winner receives a $12 gift certificate.

“We try from the very first day an employee is hired to put it into their corporate DNA,” said Krakowski, United’s vice president of safety, security and quality assurance and a veteran pilot. “We try to hard-wire this awareness into what they do.”

Back on the airfield, the trash collectors all have their favorite war stories, like the time Andrews was summoned by airport police at 2:30 a.m. to deal with a cardboard box in the middle of a service road. Inside were several exotic pythons.

The airline that shipped them wouldn’t send help, forcing Andrews, who said she was “horrified,” to try to remove the reptiles herself -- without disturbing them or letting them escape.

“I said, ‘OK, I have a shovel, I can pick them up with a shovel,’ ” she said. “I moved the box approximately 5 inches, I thought I saw something move and dropped the shovel.”

Steadier help finally arrived, Andrews recalled, from a “very brave” airport worker who swooped up the box “with his bare hands” and “drove off in the darkness.”

The airport trash collectors compare their unusual job to that of firefighters: long periods of calm punctuated by brief moments of intense activity.

“You can go months and months and months and nothing happens, and then boom, something comes along,” said Jeffrey J. Karch, a superintendent of operations.

Sometimes, it even comes along just because of a stiff onshore wind.

“When we get windy days, I don’t want to come to work,” Karch said. “Tumbleweeds the size of cars start coming off the sand dunes and go right down the runway, and I have to hang outside the door and grab them.”