alarkyokie

"De-icer shortage threatens flights..."

source:De-icer shortage threatens flights - USATODAY.com

MarioWife

I once saw a captain who deiced his whole plane by useing a broom and a ladder(I am not english so I actually dont know what those ladders are called, that support themselves).. It was not "Ice" but heavy wet icey snow, and he brushed the whole plane down, an ATP, so its large, then we went inside and did checklists: "snow on the wings" "negative", and we all agreed that we where happy with deice, and then we took off. So lets equip all our planes with soft brooms.. Problem solved for many occations. We where on time, and home in bed 6 hours before the guys waiting in line for the sprayers.

CaptainCarl

Too many people live in fear. Kudos to that captain.

Kilgore Trout

Well, count me as one of those that lives in fear of contaminated flight surfaces. Remember this one? I do, school was cancelled due to snow in Northern Virginia, and I saw the aftermath live on local tv.Air Florida Flight 90 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ewfflyer

I scraped a whole C310 with my car's ice scraper because it had about 1/3" of crusty ice on it from the transitional rain to freezing rain during an hour and a half period of time. Took about 40 minutes!

The only airport I saw that really sprayed the runway was BKL(Burke Lakefront, Cleveland). And it was right on the lake, so it made sense there, got a lot of ice.

Corny357

IIRC, that one went down because the crew missed the engine A/I in the checklists, no? Don't think icing on the wings was a factor in that one.

MarioWife

I did not read the artickle, but as I recall, they reversed the engines, to help the ground crew, and got a lot of sluch and ice in them, and then forgot to put on de-ice at all... The engines was allso not operating at max, because of ice in them. Just some vaguely remembered things from the Air Crash Investigation.. But I remember they concluded with that it was the fact that they did not de-ice the engines, and that the engines was not producing max trust, that made the accident. If they hadnt helped the ground crew, and not gotten ice in the engines, they said that the plane would have flown even with the snow sticking to the wings..

Over to another accident, my friends dad, flew cargo, a small cessna of some sort one pilot operations, he ran late one morning, and skipped de-ice, and he allso skipped sigmets and metars. So he did not know about the freezing rain at the end of the runway.. He made it to 400 feet, then the plane stalled. Fatal.

Kilgore Trout

Howdy Corny,
The NTSB accident report lists multiple factors leading to the accident. The wikipedia entry references them. There's a link to the NTSB accident report on the bottom of the wikipedia entry. Apparently it's 140 pages long!
This accident really sticks out in my mind. As I said, I remember sitting in the living room with the snow falling outside in Virginia watching the aftermath live. Camera crew running across the bridge and panning down to an arm sticking out of a crushed car. Footage of the people in the water. Terrible.
Have read opinions that the crew could have possibly avoided the accident if they'd only pushed the levers farther forward. Also have read about why they may have been reluctant to do that. I've never flown a large jet, but feel it important to counter statements above like "too many people live in fear".
Fear of what? The airplane not working right? Sure, I'm fearful of that.
And yes, I've cleaned a Beaver of snow with an old fashioned broom many a time. De-icing- five gallon buckets of hot water and hope it warms up so it does'nt freeze on the airplane. Not much fun, especially when you might fall off a floatplane and get totally soaked.
Anyway,
Cheers

VmoMmo

IIRC the engines would have produced max thrust if the thrust levers were pushed to the wall. The EPR probes were iced over, which in turn gave erroneous readings and the thrust setting the crew THOUGHT they had was something more to the effect of "Flex" power (G-whiz drivers).

That's going off memory, which can be a little short sometimes.

Corny357

Vmo, that's what I remember too.