Shedding Some Light on FOD

Compliments of U.S. Navy “Mech” Magazine

By Ltjg. Jason Bauman

Five minutes to flight quarters and my flashlight doesn’t work. I was already late, the HAC had already strapped in, and I was just now getting to preflight my SV-2. Luck would have my flashlight going from fading in and out the night before to not working at all. Hindsight would say the responsible thing to do would have been to take care of the problem the night before. However, I found myself taking the easy way out. I thought, “Nobody’s around; there’s no time to find new batteries. No harm, no foul, I’ll just grab a flashlight off of one of the SV-2’s hanging above me, return it when I get back, and no one will be the wiser.” Bad idea. This was the first mistake in a string of them, which ultimately led to me downing two aircraft.

My flight went as briefed. Nine hours of SSC in the Yellow Sea, visually identifying surface contacts. My double bag ran from 2000 to 0500 and was painfully uneventful. We were a two-plane detachment flying 24-hour operations with three crews. We had all settled into our allotted flight periods – I was getting the night bags and sleeping during the day. I felt acclimated to being awake at night and asleep during the day, but after nine hours of flying, my only thought after landing was hitting the rack. Once on the deck, only a couple minutes of work stood between me and several hours of unadulterated sleep. We were even pulling into Sasebo that afternoon for a port visit.

The water wash went by without a hitch. I put my gear up, printed out our NAVFLIR, and I was home free. Sleep never felt so good. I ended up pulling myself out of my rack about 1100. Still a little tired, I cleaned up and made my way up to the hanger to see what was going on. When I got up there, I found both aircraft were down and no one was very happy with me. Open hostility would be closer to the mark. Why? When I finished my flight the night before, I put the flashlight I borrowed back in my helmet bag. And there it stayed. The next morning, the flashlight was missed by its rightful owner and so began a search that lasted several hours. I was responsible for putting two mission capable aircraft out of action during Contingency Operations. What was worse was that the person that I took the flashlight from was held responsible for losing his flashlight.

Dismissing what happened by saying, “It’s just a flashlight, I made an honest mistake” doesn’t do the situation justice. To imply that it was no big deal because there was never any real FOD danger is incorrect. Objects that size in the right place on the aircraft could cause more damage than if it were fired at the aircraft out of a gun. This was the concern and the search for the flashlight was exhausting. To spend that many man-hours looking for the item, not find it, and then find out that the item was carelessly left in someone’s bag is not only a waste of time but also an infuriating insult. In this case, follow-up is as important as the actual action. There is no difference between a missing tool, a missing flashlight, or a missing piece of the aircraft. If all of those items are treated as deadly serious by the maintainers, then the pilots must do the same.

So how do you correct it? Apologizing, saying you’re sorry, that you’ll be more careful glosses over the fact that it’s not entirely about being more careful. Getting your priorities straight is the only permanent solution. If something is very important, you don’t forget about it. So how could I “forget” about a FOD issue? Probably because it wasn’t important enough to me until it was made important to me. Aviators have just as much responsibility as our maintainers do when it comes to FOD and FOD prevention. A valuable lesson I learned – fortunately not too late.

Ltjg. Bauman was the Operations Officer For HSL-51 Det Six, Assigned to the Forward Deployed Naval Forces (FDNF) in Atsugi, Japan.