Wings de-icing query.

[anonymous-user]

Saw this in action in Finland last Christmas.

We flew in to Helsinki, then on to Jyvaskyla. We had to have the ATR-72 de-iced, then on the way back, and on the plane from Helsinki to Gatwick.

Interesting to watch.

Here are a couple of photos of a Finnair A320 being de-iced at Helsinki.

[eharding]

Flintstone said:

Try telling russian pilots that, I've seen them go flying with stuff on their wings that would make your hair curl.

That would depend on your hair type, surely - the traditional alkaline perm would use ammonium thioglycolate, whereas a heated acid perm would use glycerol monothioglycolate - for de-icing purposes I would reckon the latter would be a better bet, but God knows what application of either would do to the airframe....assuming you could stop the Russians drinking it first (*)

As it happens, I promised our Russian engineer last week that I'd fly him in the Yak today....so looking out of the window first thing, it did strike me that trying to explain to a Russian that 5 inches of snow was going to throw a spanner into the works would make me sound like a large girl's blouseski, but happily I didn't have to - the message he left to cancel implied that his Mrs. decided she wanted him to drive her to the shops instead...so I went for a ramble round the lanes in the Rangie, had lunch at the club, and made plans for tomorrow...



(*) which reminds me of a Spudbud driving mate who ended up de-icing the wings with the contents of the *all* of the liquor on board when for some reason they ended up in India with a shedload of very, very cold fuel in the wing tanks - the Indians not being big on de-icing equipment.