Ice - is it overdone

Peter,

I have seen that photo before but that’s the first time I have read the story with it. Harrowing.

It is also completely illegal.

Alexis – this narrow legal point has been turned over and over on pilot forums over as long as they have been around (starting with rec.aviation.ifr on Usenet, and presumably Compuserve before that) and we could do the same here.

I don’t think Europe has any law on what is colloquially called “flight into known icing”. Maybe Germany has? If Germany has, how precisely does it define “known icing” and precisely what weather services are referenced in the law? Can you translate the actual wording?

The FAA has struggled with it too. Some years ago, KI was defined as any flight in IMC below 0C. That caused an uproar – it grounded the entire N-reg non deiced fleet worldwide, during the winter – and they have since gone back from that. I think NCYankee here described it a while ago.

FAA regs apply to N-regs worldwide but outside the USA they don’t map onto applicable weather services so they are mostly meaningless. European wx services are often crap – for example the UK Form 215 forecasts icing in all IMC regardless of temperature…

SLD or freezing rain is certainly serious no matter what you are flying.

I think SLD is just a very severe form of icing. You get supercooled droplets in all IMC below 0C but – even at say -5C – some don’t stick at all, some accrete very slowly (say 1mm per 10 mins), and at the far end of the spectrum you get stuff for which Americans invented the term “SLD”.

The worst is freezing rain, where you basically have water droplets of the order of 3mm diameter, supercooled, with massively rapid ice accretion. I don’t think any aircraft, even a 747, is certified for flight in FR. One has to do an immediate 180 and get out of there.

FR is fortunately very rare – for some reason, it simply doesn’t happen in normal cloud which has rain coming out of the bottom of it. If you climb into such cloud, you find that the rain stops before the temperature falls below 0C. Thousands of airliners depart into rain every day, and they climb in it, through 0C, all the way to -55C or so at FL300 or so. FR is caused by unusual situations such as rain falling from a warm layer into a cold layer. I have seen FR just once and as the OAT was about -1C I just did a very rapid descent. Nothing stuck.

Peter,
I don’t really care about the precise wording of the law. I know about the problems defining “known ice” and I’ve read some of those articles. What I do know, from reading hundreds of NTSB reports (in my time as an aviation magazine editor writing all those sad crash reports) is that it is really playing “russian roulette” to deliberatley fly into icing conditions. Be it a Cessna 150 or a TBM850 – even “moderate” icing conditions have killed too many pilots to risk this. Especially the TBM accident and the two turboprop airliner crashes due to ice should have warned us. And, face it, compared to a turboprop airliner our planes are all LEGO toys.

Of COURSE I know that it might still “happen”, even on a well planned IFR flight. And if you have de-icing like my SR22 has you have enough time to leave icing conditions. The TKS PLUS the CAPS gives me some comfort (but i don’t rely on it) – and I know that i have a real chance of surviving if I’m ever stupid enough to fly into moderfate/severe ice.

When you write that many IFR flights in light aircraft “would have to be cancelled” if one were so concerned about ice – then I agree: All flights that lead into possible icing conditions should be cancelled. After all, my motivation to be in this forum and others (COPA mostly) is to fly safer and to help reduce the dangers of GA to a lower level. A typical light aircraft flight is still 12 times more dangerous than the drive to the airport (contrary to the old tale) and the main reason for accidents is still weather. But, you know: I have never had a reason to fly in such bad weather. I am not with Lufthansa and I ‘m not an Airforce pilot. I can take the car or the airline. As long as I am the head of this flight operation I can decide when to fly – and when not. After all I am paying for it. To me surviving “35 mm of ice and a stall speed of 110 kts” does not prove anything, and it doesn’t impress me one bit.

This is a paragraph of an article on AvWeb about the topic that reflects my opinion:

Don’t Push Your Luck

Every winter, the aviation press is filled with testosterone-drenched strategies for penetrating icing conditions, aimed at pilots flying unequipped aircraft. Many of their authors can’t resist spicing things up with the story of their most harrowing encounter with ice, thinking to impress the reader with superior skill, luck, or nerve — not realizing that in so doing they merely illustrate their own foolishness in taking pointless risks. Much of this strategizing would be excellent advice for those who have “purchased the ticket,” but if you’re in a naked — or bikini-clad — airplane and penetrate visible moisture in an area of forecast icing, you’re surrendering yourself to Fate. That’s as illegal today as it was in Marion, Ind., in 1972. And, like it or not, this exposes you to enforcement action whether you crash or not. It’s as profoundly irresponsible to suggest otherwise, as it is to advise someone to snap-roll a 172 when no one is looking. Escaping detection isn’t the point. Safety is the point. [It is important to point out here that icing forecasts typically encompass a block of airspace having both vertical and lateral dimensions, and often describe the phenomenon in which the forecast condition is expected, e.g., “in clouds and precipitation,” or “above the freezing level.” Generally, in order to be within the forecast area, and thus covered by it, one must be operating within that block and within the described phenomenon. Thus, one may be inside the lateral limits of a forecast, but not in the “forecast area” because some other condition is not met.]

The whole article can be found here: http://www.avweb.com/news/airman/184265-1.html?redirected=1

All flights that lead into possible icing conditions should be cancelled.

We will have to disagree on that one, because it means no contact with any IMC below 0C.

The Avweb quote is also out of date on “illegal” – the FAA policy changed some years ago.

As I’ve said before, there is a huge difference in tactics (or strategy?) between sitting in potentially icing conditions enroute, and the lesser stuff with an escape route.

I think practically all the crashes, and near-death encounters (the two pics I posted are what I would consider absolute emergencies; the first one was a fool who got lucky and the second one was a very experienced commercial pilot who did the right things and landed) were from flights done without much regard for conditions seen enroute or during a long climb. A lot of pilots do that and I don’t think it is clever.

I fly VMC enroute almost 100% of the time (it’s in my writeups – I will do IMC if colder than -20C and I know the horizontal extent of it, and know there is no convective activity) and the climb and descent phases need a well defined layer with either lots of holes or a surface temp well above zero.

>>> We will have to disagree on that one, because it means no contact with any IMC below 0C.

Okay, let me put it this way: If LIGHT icing conditions are forcast as was the case for my area today (German PCmet) and the tops are at 4000 feet, then i actually WOULD fly IFR. If the tops were at 12000 i probably wouldn’t. I could still fly VFR on many days.

Okay, let me put it this way: If LIGHT icing conditions are forcast as was the case for my area today (German PCmet) and the tops are at 4000 feet, then i actually WOULD fly IFR. If the tops were at 12000 i probably wouldn’t. I could still fly VFR on many days.

Well there you are

We would agree. I would not do 12k tops either – not even in the summer probably because it will probably be 0C well below that.

My worst icing encounter was in smooth stratus, with absolutely no possible ice forecast…

I am rather pleased that I experienced icing March April this year. Learnt loads even if my pilot/passengers nearly gave birth from the excitement of it all. Bless.

There are many such stats, The UK stats suggest GA is comparable to motorcycling which, yes, is much worse than driving. But in motorcycling a large % of deaths are due to car drivers (I have done ~100k miles on 2 wheels, back when there were 1/3 as many cars as today, and today there are many more car drivers who are “asleep” behind the wheel) whereas in GA something like 90-95% is due to the “driver” (the remainder is due to crap maintenance, and a tiny % of midairs). But even with car accidents a large % is due to another car driver, so the stats are never going to be comparable. In GA, your life is much more in your hands.

Coming back to the “12k tops”… where do you get that data? There is no tops forecast accurate to better than plus or minus a few thousand feet, and GFS (ex GRAMET for example) fails to forecast most stratus cloud anyway.

I think one needs to be more flexible on this stuff. And the most important thing is to have the escape route.

…The UK stats suggest GA is comparable to motorcycling which…

The problem is as usual, that there is not just one “GA”. General Aviation is everything from Gyrocopter (disproportionately dangerous) to Boeing Business Jet or Corporate Airbus 319 (no accidents so far that I am aware of). In order to make meaningful statements here, we would have to look at the statistics for “non de-iced propeller driven light aircraft that fly in IMC” which is probably not available or meaningless due to the small figures involved.