Their Job: Clear the Airfield

"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.