Why Aircraft Deicing is Critical for Flight Safety

 When we talk about Environmental Factors on Aircraft performance we tend to jump to thunderstorms, strong winds, snow, and ice just to name a few. these are all things that can have a major impact on flight operations for an aircraft. Today I have a short story on how Environments play a major role in performance on aircraft. in England we usually get pretty cold winters, some where from like 0 degrees to -5 degrees Celsius some nights. well during a week of weather like this we usually get aircraft that suffer from frozen flight controls or ice/ snow on the wing. typical practice is just to get the De-Icer out and spray the jets down before crew show and things. if you didn't know what a De-Icer is, its basically a truck that spays a chemical to essentially defrost the jet. during a normal work morning we ran into a situation where our De-Icer had actually broken down and we couldn't deice the jets. as a result our take off times where pushed back and leadership wanted to take the approach of "we can just wait for the ice to melt when the sun comes up". once the sun came up and aircrew started to show up at jets, and during flight control checks, we actually had pilots not  being able to move the rudder or operate flaps because there was still ice in some areas of the aircraft. In the end, because pilots tried to operate flight controls while the jet was pretty much still frozen we ended up causing a lot of damage to the aircraft and wasted a bunch of man hours. point of this story is just to tell you how the environment plays a major role when it comes to aircraft and pre flight checks. This is just a personal story but there are many more that have happened over time.

  • American Eagle Flight 4184 was flying from Indianapolis to Chicago on 31-Oct-1994. The flight crashed near Chicago airport due to extreme weather conditions in Chicago that caused icing over aircraft’s body and resulted in loss of control. The aircraft went into two full rolls before crashing into a soybean field. None of the 68 people aboard could survive the accident.
  • Aero Caribbean Flight 883 was flying from Haiti to Havana, Cuba on 04-Nov-2010. The flight crashed in a village near Havana due to severe winter weather that caused icing over aircraft’s body. There were no survivors.
  • China Eastern Airlines Flight 5210 was flying from Mongolia to Shanghai on 21-Nov-2004. The flight crashed just minutes after takeoff due to icing that resulted in complete loss of control. The aircraft had not been deiced before takeoff.



https://aviationlearnings.com/aircraft-de-icing-truck-the-machine-that-saves-airplanes-from-freezing-in-winters/#What_is_Aircraft_Deicing

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