That is the message Dubbo City Council's airport operations manager Lindsay Mason is helping to spread during the inaugural Airport Safety Week.

A single bolt or sheet of plastic sucked into an engine could bring an aircraft down.

Apart from the obvious dangers, the financial cost to aviation linked foreign object debris (FOD) damage was estimated at more than $6 billion a year.

Examples of FOD often found around airports included aircraft parts, broken pavement or tarmac, parts from ground vehicles, rubbish and dropped maintenance tools.

When the Daily Liberal visited Mr Mason at Dubbo City Regional Airport yesterday, he displayed a handful of items that had been collected from the runway and apron areas, items he said could cause more than a handful of trouble if ingested into an aircraft engine.

They included plastic bag ties, rocks, zippers and other parts of baggage, screws and washers.

"Sometimes pop rivets come out of aircraft, and in the past we had a screwdriver on the runway," he said.

"There was also an old Palm Pilot (personal digital assistant) that had been run over, presumably left on a wing by someone during refuelling.

"It's all potentially dangerous, even a rock just 2cm wide could fly into an engine or do damage to a propeller, at the velocity at which it is travelling."

Yesterday airports in Australia and New Zealand were invited to take part in an industry-wide FOD walk to raise awareness of airside FOD as a hazard to safe aircraft operations.

Airport staff and contractors, even those that normally did not get the chance to go airside, were encouraged to walk a section of their airports and aerodrome to scan for debris.

Anyone in doubt about the dangers posed by FOD need only cast their minds back to July 2000 where a 44cm strip of metal that had come from another aircraft ruptured the tyre of an Air France Concorde, causing a chain reaction that ignited the aircraft before it crashed, killing 109 people on board the aircraft and four on the ground.

Mr Mason said the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) had stringent guidelines for Australian airports that helped prevent FOD incidents.

"CASA requires us to do serviceability inspections across the runway before the first flight of the day, including to make sure that the lights are working and that no birds have been hit," he said.

"We shine headlights along the runway in the dark because the light reflects off the metal debris and makes it easier to find it."

And while so-called birdstrikes, where birds flew into aircraft as they took off and landed, posed safety risks, it was not just living birds that caused headaches at airports.

"We have to make sure we clean up any dead birds straight away," Mr Mason said.

"If we don't, they attract the bigger birds of prey that hang around the dead birds.

"In the past few years, for instance, brown and black kites have been giving us a few problems.

"They are a big bird and we are now seeing a lot of them at regional airports in eastern Australia.

"We do our best to harass them off the runways but if there is roadkill there, so to speak, they won't leave it alone. They're just as likely to take off at the last minute and fly into an aircraft.

"We have a stringent aerodrome manual that details how we do things with different birds, their patterns and behaviours."

As part of Airport Safety Week, Mr Mason would also give a talk to airport staff and airline agents today about the importance of vigilance in maintaining a safe work environment.

"It's about being aware, because it only takes one incident," he said.

"Airport Safety Week is about highlighting what airports should be doing. For instance we have a sticker that says FOD doesn't fly, it's very appropriate."

Another issue the week would highlight was fatigue in the airline industry, Mr Mason said.