Icing Gear

Each anti- or de-icing technology has benefits and drawbacks. If you’re flying with boots, use them early and often.

Friday, October 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM ET

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Key Takeaways:

Aircraft ice protection systems are categorized as either de-icing, which removes accumulated ice (e.g., pneumatic boots), or anti-icing, which prevents ice from forming (e.g., TKS fluid, bleed-air systems).
A range of technologies exists, including pneumatic boots, TKS "weeping wing" fluid systems, electrothermal surfaces, heated bleed-air from turbine engines, and electro-expulsive systems, each with specific operating principles, benefits, and drawbacks.
Despite these systems, no aircraft is entirely immune to severe icing, and all ice protection is designed primarily to enable pilots to escape icing conditions, rather than to allow sustained flight within them, with personal aircraft often lacking full known-icing approval.

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Anyone who’s read Ernest K. Gann’s Fate Is The Hunter will recall the author’s experience in an ice-laden DC-2 over the Eastern Seaboard. After departing Nashville for New York, Gann and his captain, Hughen, encounter severe icing and attempt to return to Nashville, only to find it below minimums. They are forced to divert to Cincinnati, barely making it, thunking down the airplane on the runway after an 8+50 odyssey exhausted altitude, fuel and ideas.Their DC-2 was equipped with de-icing boots, alcohol for the props and windshield, and even a heating duct to defrost the cockpit windows. None of it could keep up with the ice accumulation or shed what turned out to be up to four inches of the stuff, providing an early demonstration that there’s no such thing as an airplane immune to icing.