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Ice Isn’t Nice

Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • Airframe icing is an unpredictable and severe hazard that significantly degrades aircraft performance, emphasizing the need for pilots to avoid conditions where it can form.
  • The featured accident highlights how a pilot's decision to fly into icing conditions, combined with impairment from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning due to a cracked heat exchanger, can lead to a loss of aircraft control.
  • The incident underscores the critical importance of pre-flight weather briefings, sound pilot judgment, thorough aircraft maintenance (including exhaust systems), and the use of safety devices like CO detectors to prevent similar accidents.
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Airframe icing can be found year-round, depending on geography and altitude. In North America, we’re heading into the season when pilots of personal airplanes, which generally don’t fly high enough to worry about ice most of the year, need to factor it into their planning and execution. Even if you’re flying something with a form of ice protection more capable than a warm pitot tube.

One of the things about in-flight airframe icing is it’s relatively unpredictable: A single ice encounter that doesn’t present an operational hazard—a glazed windshield, for example—in no way implies the next one will be as benign.

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