Frost and Freeze Warning....

When I meet people for the first time, they frequently say "Oh, so you're from Texas, right?" and I quickly correct them, saying "Actually, I'm from Minnesota - I just LIVE in Texas!". But come to think of it, I have spent many more years flying in Texas than I ever did in Minnesota, and today I realized that I even THINK like a Texas pilot. I was trying for an early, crack of dawn launch from big Bear Lake in California to get back to Houston earlier in the day, and since Louise needed to head down the hill about 0600 to catch her commercial flight back to D.C., I asked her to drop me off and wait until I got the engine started before departing, Well, the engine fired up right away, but the lights from our headlamps showed I wasn't going anywhere until the sun came up. What caught my attention was a thick blanket of frost on the entire airplane.







Now for many of you, this is nothing unusual, but even when I was back in the frozen north, I rarely had to deal with a thick coat of frost - a six inch blanket SNOW, yes, but frost...well, I have read so many magazine articles and safety posts over the years about the affects of even minimal layers of frost, but it has usually been an academic exercise for me - especially living on th gulf coast!

Today I dredged those article back out of my brain, along with the thought that I was sitting at an altitude of almost 7,000'....and I told Louise to have a safe drive down to LA - I'd head back to the cabin and wait for awhile until the sun came up and started to melt things off! I sure didn't want to flight test a fuzzy layer of ice in the boundary layer....

Even though the sun did a good job of melting the frost on the black parts of the airplane, I got impatient with the huge white areas, and discovered a good use for my EAA membership card. Thirty minutes of scraping and I not only had the Val ready to fly, but I was warmed and exercised from the effort, and the take-off went without a hitch.

All this is a long way of saying that fall is here, and frost is going to be more common. I hadn't given it a thought for so long that I simply had to revert to remembering basic training admonitions - no frost is acceptable! If you deal with it all the time, it is second nature - and if you don't, then the one tie you find it, don't forget those basics.

(However, it was an awful nice way to watch the breaking dawn up in the mountains...not too cold, the smell of pine trees in the air....it was hard to mount up and head back to Houston!)

Frost is a big factor

When I was about 14 I saw a guy early one morning getting into a 160hp Tri-Pacer covered with heavy frost. I was old enough to know that that wasn't a good idea and young enough to tell him so. He snorted, shut the door (he was solo), and proceeded to use all of a 2000 foot runway just to get airborne. One half mile later he barely cleared some powerlines. Made a big impression on me.

Timely post.....

An acquaintance of mine stalled a heavily loaded Air Tractor 602 on his first flight of the day, carrying a hopper full (around 4000#) of granular fertilizer on the very first load of the day with heavy frost on his wings, totalling the airplane.

"Polishing" the leading edge, with a rag, back to the spar is of great benefit if you don't have access to a water hose to melt it. The other pilot technique is to not rotate the airplane as usual. Accelerate down the runway with a slight angle of attack without regards to airspeed and the airplane will lift off when there is sufficient lift. Then accelerate to a higher airspeed than normal for the climb. We ag pilots use this technique daily since we can't know at what airspeeed we should lift off since the gross weight ranges from 4000# to 8400# and the DA rises fast here in the South. My takeoffs can be done in 1500' up to 3000' hot 'n heavy.

Regards,

Paul, it is a good thing you posted those pictures - many Texans might just think it was some kind of "airplane fungus" that grew on the plane overnight!

I can remember scraping frost, ice, snow off from the Warriors I learned to fly in near Denver. I hate to think of what we did to those Lycomings starting them up in those cold mornings. They always started, but we never did metal analysis either!

Funny

I was just checking my TMX engine sales brocure manual document...I have just changed the oil and even though I knew I really should put 80wt oil in I only had aeroshell 100w...so in it went.

Sure enough we need to take a trip to sacremento next month and won't have access to my toasty engine block heater.

Anyway, in the manual it says that SAE 50 oil (i.e what 100w oil is) is good down to 30F.

FWIW

Frank

I saw a Cessna 421 pilot let the plane sit out at our airport through a snow storm and promptly load up his passengers and blast off without cleaning anything off the airplane. We offered to put it inside and then offered to help him clean it off. I'm not sure how much snow/whatever else had accumulated on the plane, but... any amount is iffy.

Made most of us in the lobby cringe... but never heard about him in the newspaper, so I guess he made it.

Just gotta listen

pierre smith said:

The other pilot technique is to not rotate the airplane as usual. Accelerate down the runway with a slight angle of attack without regards to airspeed and the airplane will lift off when there is sufficient lift.

Click to expand...

Most of the time the airplane will tell you what it needs, all you have to do is know how to listen.

Ironflight said:

When I meet people for the first time, they frequently say "Oh, so you're from Texas, right?" and I quickly correct them, saying "Actually, I'm from Minnesota - I just LIVE in Texas!".

Click to expand...

Is that a Minnesota thing? I do the same thing. "I am not from St Louis I just live there. I am from Minnesota". I actually have lived in St Louis (23 years) longer than I did in Minnesota (20 years).

I do not miss pre-flighting and starting a Tomahawk for a 7am flight. It took 30 minutes just to get the door open to get the pre-flight check list out. It took another 30 minutes to get the 3-4 inches of snow off the plane and 30 more minutes with the propane preheater blowing under the cowl.

I actually miss Minnesota winters.

plehrke said:

I actually miss Minnesota winters.

Click to expand...

I do too....but not five month's worth! I also don't miss draining the oil out of a J-3 at the end of the day, then warming it up the next morning on the stove before pouring it back in to the engine to fly on skis in the middle of the winter....well, maybe I miss it a little!

Paul

Paul...

Even though it's plastic, was the EAA card 'kind' to your paint?

I kind of cringe at the thought of it , with that awesome paint job!

It was before my time, but local legend says a guy in a PT-22 ran his hand down one frosty wing, climbed in and did a half-roll on takeoff. Don't really know if it's true, but scared me...

Bob Kelly

You can get away with it sometimes, but

Paul was showing a thick layer of frost. In fact, a very thin layer can give you a lot of problems. Almost imperceptible upperwing contamination can keep you on the ground. That is why some airplanes now require a tactile inspection. Pierre describes techniques that work/help but since I don't have his kind of experience, I just go with "keep it clean."

The insidious part is that you can often take off with upperwing contamination, then one time you can't.

After the Montrose upperwing icing accident, the Saftey Board issued a Safety Alert about upperwing ice (there was a lot of ground accumulated ice on that airplane). The SA is slanted to non-slatted turbojets because of the accident, but the information applies equally to big and small airplanes. Just remember, it is hard to get a good pic of "almost imperceptible" ice.



http://ntsb.gov/alerts/SA_006.pdf

Tanis Aircraft Products

Howdy!

Yes, Frost happens. That is why we sell frost covers, preheat systems for engines, the cabin and avionics, and for those who park for the winter, a dehydrator in lieu of a pickle kit. Check it out. . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drXqsZXaLgM

Just clarifying... I wasn't advocating what the guy in my story did (taking off with snow, etc. on the aircraft). It scared the heck outta me and I used it as a teaching tool for my students -- "DON'T DO THAT".

Windshield Deicer works well

Well, if you want to take off, windshield deicer works well. Follow it up with an EAA card, maybe a few paper towels, you have a clean airframe. Make to to get ALL of it off, not just the wings.

Hans

I'm one of those "southern" fliers. Ice is something I strive to never find in my -6. Sooo...here I am up in Salt Lake City for a week with the in-laws. We had planned on flying back to SoCal today. We woke up to 200' ceilings, which was plenty for me to wait a day.

...and then it started snowing. It was 80 just the other day here. Snow!? Not that much, but it's still enough to stick to the plane. I went out & shot some photos & video of the little bit of snow. Here's some of the photos:

Chunks o' ice on the wingtips.

Canopy covered in slush

Still snowing (note the cold tailcam )

Weathermeister says clear skies all the way home tomorrow. Go away snow!!

Have an ice day....

From the NTSB report on the Dick Ebersol, Challenger crash in Montrose.

Safety board warns pilots to feel wings for ice
WASHINGTON (AP) ? In a rare move, federal safety officials on Wednesday are sending a letter to all pilots warning them to run their hands along their aircraft's wings before takeoff to make sure tiny amounts of ice haven't formed and increased the risk of an accident.

The National Transportation Safety Board said the unusual alert, targeted at pilots of smaller planes, stemmed from discussions about icing during the investigation of the Nov. 28 crash in Montrose, Colo., that killed the 14-year-old son of NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol and two other people.

NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz said the accident raised the issue, though investigators haven't determined that icing caused the crash of the Challenger jet.

"We know the Ebersol crash was in icing conditions, but we don't know it was an icing incident at this point," Lopatkiewicz said.

Ice on a wing disrupts the flow of air, which can cause the wing to lose its lift and the plane to dive.

The safety board said that most pilots don't know that a thin layer of frost or ice could have consequences as severe as those caused by much larger ice accumulations.

"Fine particles of ice or frost, the size of a grain of table salt and distributed as sparsely as one per square centimeter over an airplane wing's upper surface, can destroy enough lift to prevent that airplane from taking off," the NTSB said.

Following the Montrose crash, the FAA said it was reviewing a British recommendation to strengthen its deicing rules following their probe into the crash of a another Challenger crash in Birmingham, England in 2002.

After looking into that crash, the British Department of Transport pointed out in August that FAA deicing rules say that all frost and ice should be removed from an aircraft unless pilots smooth it or polish it before taking off. Such an exception is not allowed in Canada or the United Kingdom and they recommended doing away with it.

The safety board said in its letter that pilots may not understand the risk posed by a nearly imperceptible amount of ice.

"From an aerodynamic point of view, there is no such thing as "a little ice," the board said. "No amount of snow, ice or frost accumulation on the wing upper surface can be considered safe for takeoff."

A pilots' union representative took issue with that claim.

"Airline pilots understand the issues involved in aircraft icing," said Chris Baum, manager of engineering and accident investigation for the Air Line Pilots Association, the biggest pilots union.

"The existing training and operating procedures are sufficient to ensure that the airplanes are operated without ice and operated safely," Baum said.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said regulations clearly state that pilots have to make sure the aircraft's wings are free of ice.

"Pilots have to use whatever means necessary to make sure the wings are safe to fly with," Brown said.

The safety board said the only way to tell if there isn't any ice on the wing is to touch it.

The alert is aimed at smaller planes, such as corporate jets, regional jets and private aircraft.

Pilots of larger planes, such as Boeing 747s, have such rigorous anti-icing procedures that the warning doesn't apply to them, Lopatkiewicz said.

"We've never lost a 747 due to icing," Lopatkiewicz said.

Great heads up! The sky's thinking about parting & ice is disappearing from my forecast. Go away ice!

it's that time of the year...

good read !

Paul's pictures reminded me of a similar experience in my -7A. My plane is unpainted. I found that the thick layer of frost had ONLY accumulated on the fibreglas tips, cowl and prop. All of the unpainted alclad aluminum areas, wings, stab, aft fuselage, etc., were completely CLEAR of any frost. The Cherokee 6 parked right next to me looked just like Paul's RV-8.

After removing the frosty canopy cover, I was 90% ready to go. I sprayed a little de-icer spray on the prop, scraped the tips and cowl a bit and I was off. The heat from the engine had melted it off the cowl by the time I got to the runway.

Mike

My first encounter of frost during flight made a lasting impression on me. I was flying my glider at high altitude during winter, and on the descend I came into a slightly more humid air mass. The result was a very thin layer of frost on the wings, hardly visible at all. But the plane got noisy, sink rate increased dramatically, and she didn't really like to fly anymore below around 60 kts - the clean stall speed is 37 kts. Nothing to joke about.

Hendrik