Keep Your Aircraft Clean

Ice, snow or frost adhering to our wings and other control surfaces add weight and drag, and can change way air flows over and around the airframe, making an otherwise clean air flow dirty. How dirty? Lets drill down a little bit into the underlying aerodynamics of airframe contamination for a better understanding of what the difference between a clean and contaminated airplane can mean.

Mike Hart

Tuesday, January 19, 2016 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Ice, snow, or frost contamination on aircraft surfaces severely compromises aerodynamics by disrupting laminar airflow, drastically increasing drag, and significantly reducing lift.
This aerodynamic degradation leads to premature and unpredictable stalls, often without the typical pre-stall warnings or a reliable critical angle of attack.
Regulatory prohibitions against taking off with contaminated surfaces have existed for decades, yet pilot failure to adequately de-ice remains a primary cause of related accidents.
Thorough physical pre-flight inspections and complete removal of all contamination from critical aircraft surfaces are essential for flight safety.

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A popular urban legend maintains there are dozens of words Eskimos use to describe snow. The truth, according to scholars, is there are numerous dialects of the Eskimo, Inuit and Sami languages describing frozen moisture and they all add suffixes to root words to refine concepts, just as with English and other languages. Whether we call it snow, ice, slush, a wintry mix or something more colorful, when it gets on our airplane it’s all the same: contamination.

Ice, snow or frost adhering to our wings and other control surfaces add weight and drag, and can change way air flows over and around the airframe, making an otherwise “clean” air flow “dirty.” How dirty? Let’s drill down a little bit into the underlying aerodynamics of airframe contamination for a better understanding of what the difference between a clean and contaminated airplane can mean.