When any pilot considers cold-weather flying, in-flight airframe icing is first and foremost on the list of worries. Icing is an important safety risk to all types of airplanes, and a great deal of cost and effort is spent to avoid icing or to safely remove it or prevent it from accumulating. But the cold months bring many more widespread threats to flying safety and cause many, many times more accidents than in-flight icing. They are the dangerous six, or winter weather’s worst half-dozen threats.
Darkness
By last September, the hours of darkness caught and passed the amount of daylight in every 24 hours in the Northern Hemisphere. By the time the cold of winter set in, the number of daylight hours, depending on your latitude, shrank to eight or less in the northern parts of the contiguous United States. In Alaska, the sun barely made an appearance.
