Another question (missed edit on my last one):
Can an airport de-ice you whether you (the captain) likes it or not?
I have a vague (very vague) recollection of de-icing trucks at O’Hare airport being stationed on the taxi-ways and hosing down planes with de-icing fluid just prior to takeoff.
Did each plane get a choice or was the airport hosing down everything, like it or not, and sending them a bill? (I would ask if the airport just ate the cost but that seems laughable.)
Yet one more add:
I watched the video again and they are not consistent. If de-icing fluid cost $10/gallon they mention it takes 4,000 gallons to de-ice that cargo plane. So, $40,000.
No surprise a TV show was loosey-goosey about their numbers but we can be sure this is not cheap.
No, they can’t force you to deice. Stationing the deicier at the end of the taxiway means ice or freezing snow is accreting so fast that they couldn’t deice on the ramp and make it to the runway in time. If it’s sticking to the lifting surfaces that means the temperature is near freezing. If it’s well below freezing a powdery snow will just blow off the plane.
I didn’t even think of that. Very interesting. Also, the Wiki site on the Dreamlifter confirms your post that the cargo area is unpressurized.
Since it’s such an ugly patch they should have painted it like a giant sewing stitch complete with needle. that would have been a hoot…
While we’re on the Dreamlifter, here is a site showing the loader used for it.
Imagine loading a standard side door load with that.
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So if the captain doesn’t want to pay for de-icing the airport will let them go and maybe crash?
I can see where this gets difficult…and I guess the pilot-in-charge has to be the final say on what happens to their plane. Still…checks and balances seem in order and someone should be able to tell a pilot that they can’t takeoff. If they do not want to pay for de-icing then fine…go to somewhere in the airport to wait it out (which I am sure the airport will also charge for).
I don’t know how it works in other airlines, but where I worked it wasn’t a “choice”. The rules for de-icing were very clearly defined. If you had ice where you shouldn’t have ice (some areas of light ice on the underside of the wing where the fuel tanks are can be ok), then you either de-ice or you don’t go. Now it’s possible for a captain to look at the plane and say, “we don’t need to de-ice”, but the engineers know it’s wrong, the other pilot knows it is wrong and some of the passengers know it is wrong. It would be a brave captain who puts themselves in that position.
The cost is irrelevant. If the company decides de-icing is too expensive in general, then they can decline to use the procedure in general and leave their aircraft grounded every time ice hits an airport. It’s not up to the captain to make cost/benefit decisions like that.
For perspective swap the word “deice” and “fuel”. The airport doesn’t force you to put fuel on the plane but it’s essential to the flight. There is no “fuel police” at the airport forcing you take on fuel. The Captain is responsible for the safety of flight so the opposite is generally true. If an Airline plots out “X” amount of fuel the Captain can review the weather and decide the plane needs more fuel.
I posted a photo of the rear of the aircraft (not showing any identifying markings) in General Aviation Junkyard with the text ‘1991 Boeing 757-200 at KSWF has not flown since January, 2017. One engine missing parts, both engines shrink-wrapped.’
As to the various de-icing questions as to airline ops, which includes most cargo operators …
A bit of terminology: there’s “de-ice” and “anti-ice” and they’re completely different (albeit complementary) processes using different chemicals and techniques. In a nutshell, de-icing removes whatever is sitting on, or stuck to, the airplane. That’s step 1 and is always needed if there’s anything frozen at all on the airplane. The only decision is whether we need to clean the whole airplane nose to tail, or clean just the wings & tail surfaces while leaving some light frost stuck to the fuselage or engine cowlings.
Step 2 is anti-icing that prevents precip that’s still falling from sticking to the airplane for long enough to get airborne. Anti-icing in unnecessary if it’s not actively precipitating. The colder, windier, or harder it’s falling, the shorter the protection lasts. Absolute worst situation is freezing rain; we’re pretty much stopped if that’s happening.
The FAA through basic flight regulations and its carrier-specific oversight programs sets forth the rules. Under what weather conditions, which fluids are approved, how long they’re deemed to last under which conditions, etc. There’s a lot of active science in this and we get revised procedures every Fall. A pilot who chooses to ignore those procedures would be hanging their ass out a mile. Both in terms of risking an accident and in terms of risking their licenses even if the flight goes routinely.
I just checked and the section of our 737 operating procedures manual that addresses cold weather ops including de-icing / anti-icing runs to 95 pages(!). 20 pages are tables of “this weather + that fluid → this much protection time”. The other 75 pages are procedures to follow from preflight through shutdown at the other end. The bulk of which are de-ice anti-ice ground ops before departure.
The rules are always black and white. The reality is more shades of gray. When it’s actively snowing, decisions are fairly easy, subject to judgement about just how hard it’s snowing. A good example of a more nuanced situation was me yesterday.
We were leaving LGA at 7am. The overnight low had only gotten down to 34F, but the airplane had arrived at around midnight after a long flight which meant the metal wings might well have been below freezing for a long time after they parked. It had rained or drizzled all evening and until about 4am. The weather reports showed brief snow flurries around 2am, despite temps above freezing at that time. So far so ordinary in the Northeastern US in early Spring.
By 6am at first light as we’re evaluating the situation, there’s not a cloud in the sky. We look out the side windows at the top of the wing. No visible frost or snow. But there’s ~1" bubbles/drops of water randomly all over the top of the wings. Maybe one every 8" - 12" or so. Are any of them frozen? They sure are shiny, but it’s a brand new airplane (MAX of course) and the bare paint is real shiny too. Or is there a smidgen of ice in some of those blobs of water? Darn hard to tell for absolute certain; it’s 50 feet from the cabin window to the base of the winglet.
Choosing to de-ice in that circumstance might generate a delay and expense. If necessary we’d do it without question. But is it necessary? Clearly anti-icing was unnecessary since no precip was falling. What to do? Well, that’s where the combined 50 years of experience in the cockpit bets everyone’s lives. We decided it was all liquid water and I’m still typing today.
At most airports, either the carriers’ own people or a contract vendor de-ice/anti-ice the airplanes at or near the gate. At the big hubs where taxi times are long when the weather sucks, it’s more common for the airport to have a single central vendor and a special parking area near the ends of the runways to provide deice services. Whether any given jet avails themselves of those services is up to the pilot, not the airport or ATC. In any case whoever does the work sends a bill to the airplane operator.
Again, the pilot is guided by, and bound by, the FAA approved procedures of their employer. But the only people who know if the pilot is doing right or going rogue are the two pilots in that airplane. The deice vendors, the airport operator, and ATC don’t know or care.
As @Magiver said, in shitty conditions we only have a handful of minutes to be airborne after *anti-*icing finished. In really shitty conditions you can’t go at all. If it takes 10 minutes to deice the whole plane and the must-take-off interval is just 8 minutes, the first wing will expire before the second one is done.
Expense. At my carrier I’m expected to use sound judgement to not spend unnecessarily, but to never cut safety corners in the name of saving time or money. So I don’t load extra fuel “just in case” for vague what-ifs. But I do load extra fuel, and burn extra fuel carrying that weight, when I think HQ has rosier-colored glasses than I do for the situation at hand. I do diligently search for the most efficient altitude and routing once airborne based on the tactical situation out there. I don’t waste time while we’re out of the gate & the meter is running at $50/minute. But if we have an administrative or ATC SNAFU we park out of the way and take the time to fix it, not just take off and hope it’ll straighten itself out in the air. That was this morning’s challenge; two of them in fact. If there’s a thunderstorm 15 miles away and not in our intended path we take off. If it’s overhead the field, or just off the runway we sit until it moves away. But where to draw the line? That’s where your flight crew earns its pay. I/we spend 100% of what’s necessary without hesitation, but not extra for wasteful reasons.
[aside]FYI, the areas where they de-/anti-ice have to collect 100% of the runoff and process it as hazmat. So you’ve got a concrete pad 1/4 mile on a side, or 3 or 4 of them, where 100% of the rain, snow, and assorted sky-glop that falls on them, plus all the sprayed fluids, must be collected and sent off to a chemical reprocessing plant. Talk about expensive![/aside]
Part of the reason bizjets have a vastly poorer safety record than airliners is precisely because the Boss sitting in back is often a cheap ass; that’s how he (usually he) got rich enough to have a bizjet. And he’s used to his decisions prevailing even if he’s utterly unqualified to make the decisions. A strong pilot labor Union is one of the most important safety features on an airplane. It stiffens the backbones of the weaker crew personalities against the worst of overbearing managements. Not that we have that overbearing manager problem in the major airlines, but some of the scruffier operators are happy to fire crews for “excessive” caution. Pour encourager les autres.
Well that and a lot of them are flown by “the boss”. I watched Roush make an aggressive turn to final at Oshkosh and THEN tighten it into a stall. The whole time I was saying “WTF” is this person doing? Go around. He was so low to the ground that he and his passenger survived but not without injuries.
I have seen examples of accidents which they think were partially caused by captains making a cost/benefit calculation. Perhaps most famously was the Canary Islands crash. While we can never know some think that, at least part of the cause, was the captain being super eager to get going to avoid the plane being grounded and the costs associated with that.
Are captains never assessed on their relative cost of operating a plane? Costs being anything from paying for de-icing to delaying a flight and messing up schedules. If captain-A flies for a year on a given route and operations under him/her cost the airline $1 million less than captain-B will the airline not consider that when it comes to promotions or who gets laid-off first?
(@LSLGuy answered the de-icing bit but this goes more to captains being concerned about the financial side of flying their plane)
Missed the edit…again @LSLGuy mentioned some of the stress between pilots and finances of operation. Some seem to be clearly (and very intentionally) taken out of anyone’s hands with hard rules (if A then B…period). But clearly gray areas remain.
Sure, captains are always making cost/benefit decisions, however, in any well-run company the strategic commercial decisions have already been made and it is the captain’s job to operate the aircraft from A-B safely while giving consideration to those decisions.
While it is appropriate for a captain to be conscious of the potential costs of an unplanned layover for passengers and crew, it is not appropriate to let that influence the safety of the flight. With the Canary Islands accident, it is fine for the captain of the flight to want to get everyone off the island, but not so fine to let that affect his ability to operate safely.
In the case of de-ice/anti-ice, it is appropriate for the captain to be aware of the cost of the procedure and for that to be a factor in their decision making, but it is not appropriate to just decide not to de-ice when it is legally required just because it is expensive. The company knows what it costs, they know when it is required, they schedule flights in weather conditions that require de-icing, they train the crews to use the de-ice procedures, therefore the commercial decision was made long ago that de-icing is an acceptable expense. On the other hand it would not be appropriate for a captain to request de-icing when they know it is not required unless they had a good reason.
With @LSLGuy’s personal example above, you’ll note that he was aware of the affects on the company of using de-ice procedures but it was ultimately a safety decision. The potential cost just means it’s a much more carefully considered safety decision as opposed to just going with the most conservative action.
That’s a big DEPENDS. The industry standard is that promotions, redundancies, etc are based on your seniority within the company but there are many different ways of doing things and I’m sure favouritism and other "ism"s are out there if you know where to look.
I have flown for a company where the job was essentially to cruise at the best range speed out over the ocean while looking for anything that may be of interest to the government. The flight routes were almost always longer than the endurance of the aircraft, so you stayed out for as long as possible and came back home when the maths said you would be landing with a safe minimum amount of fuel.
Getting some extra miles on a sortie was considered important and they went through a phase of publishing fuel consumption graphs of individual captains for comparison. I am not aware of anyone suffering negative consequences other than mild ribbing from work colleagues (one captain earned the nickname “Fuel Burn” for his less than economical efforts).
I was once pulled aside when I was quite new and still flying piston engined machines and advised that my fuel burns were higher than everyone else’s. It was suggested that perhaps I didn’t know how to lean the fuel mixture properly. I told them, no, I knew how to lean the mixture, I’d just been flying around 10 knots faster than the long range speed because the long range speed is bloody uncomfortable in turbulence, which we got a lot of! It was suggested to me that I should slow down a bit. I stayed there a long time, no negative consequences for my slightly rogue operating procedures.
Sometimes the captain who doggedly tows the company line actually costs far more money than if they used a bit of discretion. There was a captain who was known as a “fuel nazi”, that is he would only ever take flight plan fuel, he would never add any discretionary fuel. He once took minimum fuel on a hot day departing from a large international airport. By the time he’d taxied out to the duty runway, the brakes had got too hot and they couldn’t depart, they had to wait for them to cool down (no brake fans). But oh no, they didn’t have enough fuel to wait so they had to return to the gate and put more fuel on. Had he learned his lesson though? He only put enough on to replace what they’d burned and when they got back to the runway, the same thing happened, hot brakes, can’t take off, no spare fuel for waiting, back to the gate again. This time the FO finally managed to get through to him that perhaps a few hundred kgs of extra fuel might ensure they actually got airborne this time.
Probably not costs. More inconvenience. Newspaper headline level inconvenience.
If they had not gotten airborne by some arbitrary moment set on the clock by a regulation that brooks zero exceptions, they’d have been stranded on the island. There were no hotels. The 400+ people would have been stuck on the airplane. No material ground customer service staff to help them. No source of more food. Yes, the toilets could have been drained.
Now, how long will the airplane stay there? The crew can’t leave; there’s nobody to replace them in operating the airplane and managing the soon-to-be-rioting passengers. So they’re not getting the rest that is the goal of the rule that prevents their departure after that magic time on the clock. Everybody would have to wait until HQ could arrange to ferry a fresh replacement crew out there on some other airplane. That might easily be 12 hours and might be 24. During which lots of miserable people will become angry people. How many of the elderly passengers will run out of oxygen bottles during that time? What about the 2 pregnant women? Will we have a birth?
Airborne, we have lots of leeway to bypass pettifogging regs and procedures that obstruct doing the safest thing in a crisis. On the ground we have zero leeway. All times are recorded to the second by computers; there’s no taking off 1 minute late and claiming you misread your watch or that it was slightly mis-set.
That can create a pressure to hurry. To hear what you subconsciously want to hear, to glance at something that should be evaluated thoroughly, to not examine your unexamined assumptions based on experience.
Time pressure should be a spur to prompt action, but not to hurrying. I often say “We can work quickly; we can’t hurry.” There is a difference.
Many times late in a workday I’ve faced the decision to board passengers or not. e.g. Some or all of the crew runs out of time in 1 hour and 15 minutes; we must be airborne by then, or we go to the hotel.
Right now we’re just getting to the airplane and it typically takes about an hour from here for us to prep and load the jet, then 15 minutes to push, start, taxi, and get airborne. If anything goes wrong and slows us down even a couple minutes, we’ll have loaded and taxied, only to need to go back to the gate, kick everybody off the airplane, and face the anger of the passengers for stupidly wasting 90+ minutes of their time that could have been better spent arranging a replacement crew. Which effort will now take either a couple hours best case, or overnight worst case. On top of the time I just wasted. We’re in a customer service business. That’s not good customer service.
What are examples of things going wrong? More than 2 wheelchair pax, and especially any aisle chair pax. Extra kids. Unusually many carry-ons. Some testy customers. Anyone sitting in not their own seat. Language barriers. A problem with the fueling. Shift change for the ground crew happening in the middle of loading. A minor maintenance glitch they can “fix” by deferring into the maintenance log, if only we find it early enough and they can get a mechanic on board early enough to do the paperwork soon enough. An ATC glitch. The ramp happens to clog with other push-outs just before we’re ready to push. It happens to start raining, or worse yet lightning-ing partway through loading. The list is almost endless.
OTOH, us quitting early and dumping the problem on HQ to find a replacement crew before the situation is obviously hopeless has its own problems.
Decisions decisions. Being an airline Captain is about far more than safely flying an airplane. Just as playing pro ice hockey is about far more than just ice skating. Skating well is assumed; it’s all the bigger stuff that separates the real pros from the rest of the pack.
Despite COVID-driven shrinkage, my carrier alone does this 10K times a week almost always without significant screwups. The industry as a whole is far larger than just us. OTOH, I often fly unscheduled early morning flights to somewhere that are actually the second attempt at a late night departure yesterday that somehow never went. I never learn the details of what went wrong, but I know the broad outline of that play. Nobody on that airplane is happy to have spent the night in the terminal.
Does this mean the plane needs two steps to make the plane free from ice for a while?
Truck-1 comes out and de-ices (removes any existing ice on the plane) and truck-2 sprays anti-icing agents on the plane (keep any new ice from forming for some time)?
The video below (queued to where he talks about this) discusses the crash of Air Florida flight 90 which crashed in Washington D.C. in 1982. He mentions that de-icing was one step meant to both remove ice and provide some buffer to keep ice from forming. That said, from earlier in the video, he mentions that the whole de-icing thing was not very well understood compared to today.
A lot went wrong that day. Beyond just simply not getting the airplane as de-iced as it should have been. Like the MAX accidents, this was also a newbie crew with inadequate training at an inadequate airline who were placed in the position of needing to do something they really didn’t know how to do correctly.
The ultimate problem was they took off with far less power than they should have. Into really crappy weather conditions off by far the most dangerous runway in the USA where jet airliners are even (wrongfully IMO) allowed.
And yes the whole de-/anti-icing thing has gotten a lot more sophisticated. That accident and a couple others of the same era was really a wake-up call to FAA that they, the manufacturers, and the operating industry didn’t really understand this stuff as well as they thought they did.
This new movie may be of interest:
https://www.clevelandfilm.org/films/2021/red-horizon
when did they start with anti-ice. I only remember 1 truck in the process.