Ice on the Wings Brings About a Near-Miss Episode

Dealing with the weather predicament once presented an unexpected and harrowing learning opportunity.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024 at 07:10 PM ET

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Perhaps the most dangerous thing in life, and most certainly in aviation, is that you don’t know what you don’t know. [Illustration: Joel Kimmel]

Key Takeaways:

An eager pilot critically underestimated the danger of a thin layer of ice on his Cessna 150's wings during a winter night flight, leading to a dangerously underperforming aircraft during takeoff.
The combination of inexperience, night flying, winter conditions, and wing contamination nearly resulted in a crash, highlighting the swift progression of an "accident chain."
The terrifying near-miss instilled a lifelong lesson in the pilot: never fly with any wing contamination and to constantly ask "What about this do I not know?" to proactively identify unforeseen risks.

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The well-known accident chain we read about in National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports also happens, no doubt even more often, in incidents that end up as hard-won lessons instead of accidents. The chain often starts well before the first rotation of a prop at start-up.

My father got his private certificate when I was a tyke. He logged about 800 hours in his life. He never owned his own airplane, but I grew up around aviation enough to have caught the disease very early. Though he was the one who actually taught me to fly, he was not an instructor. I went through the formality of earning my private certificate in 1983 at the age of 26. I did this at the Grosse Ile Municipal Airport (KONZ) in Michigan, located on an island in the mouth of the Detroit River where it empties into Lake Erie. I always loved flying, but now I was rabid about it.