Airliner Deicing Procedure?

FormerHangie

FormerHangie

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FormerHangie
My daughter is flying from CLE to ATL this evening. Her flight is 3:20 late. At one point they got everyone out of the airplane and and moved it somewhere, they claimed it was for "deicing", for an hour. I always thought that was something that was done on the way to the active and had to be done shortly before takeoff. I'm assuming they had a mechanical issue and didn't want to tell the passengers that. It's not an airport delay, her flight was supposed to depart at 4:59, and their CLE-ATL flight that was scheduled for 7:43 was only four minutes late, and will arrive 35 minutes before the one she's on.

So what is the procedure for deicing an airliner before it departs?
 
Deicing can be done at the gate, after pushback or at a remote deicing pad. It doesn’t take long to cause delays when deicing is in effect. Lines can be long and in really bad cases, you may exceed your holdover time and have to get sprayed down again. Type I is a deice fluid and works to get snow/frost off the aircraft. Type IV is an anti ice fluid that coats the plane and helps prevent precipitation buildup on the critical surfaces. When it’s snowing, you’ll typically have to get type I and IV. The process usually only takes about 15-20 minutes.
 
Deicing can be a bit complicated. So much depends on how much snowfall and of what kind. water equivalent level temp etc. Then what kind of fluid is being used and at what mixture.
So it is unlikely they unloaded all the pax and towed the plane to a place to deice, and then take the time to reload everyone before takeoff. Hold over times could easily be exceeded. So why do that? Might be to reset the clock for how long pax can be on the plane waiting to depart. That is a real problem. Unpredictable at best and very high fines for missing the estimates.
 
jordane93 said:
Deicing can be done at the gate, after pushback or at a remote deicing pad. It doesn’t take long to cause delays when deicing is in effect. Lines can be long and in really bad cases, you may exceed your holdover time and have to get sprayed down again. Type I is a deice fluid and works to get snow/frost off the aircraft. Type IV is an anti ice fluid that coats the plane and helps prevent precipitation buildup on the critical surfaces. When it’s snowing, you’ll typically have to get type I and IV. The process usually only takes about 15-20 minutes.
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Thanks. After a 3 hour delay they taxied out, stopped, and went back to the gate with a mechanical issue. They were lying.
 
FormerHangie said:
Thanks. After a 3 hour delay they taxied out, stopped, and went back to the gate with a mechanical issue. They were lying.
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After a tarmac delay of three hours passengers must be given an opportunity to deplane. Why do you think they were lying? Who is "they"? Sometimes there is miscommunication between cockpit, ramp, gate agents and whoever else is involved. That doesn't make them liars.
 
dmspilot said:
After a tarmac delay of three hours passengers must be given an opportunity to deplane. Why do you think they were lying? Who is "they"? Sometimes there is miscommunication between cockpit, ramp, gate agents and whoever else is involved. That doesn't make them liars.
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"tarmac" REALLY. On an aviation forum?
 
Pinecone said:
"tarmac" REALLY. On an aviation forum?
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Yeah because that's what it's called in Title 49 of the United States Code. Would you like me to call it something else? Long Dum bass Delay maybe?

Screenshot_20221118-092343.png
 
FormerHangie said:
My daughter is flying from CLE to ATL this evening. Her flight is 3:20 late. At one point they got everyone out of the airplane and and moved it somewhere, they claimed it was for "deicing", for an hour. I always thought that was something that was done on the way to the active and had to be done shortly before takeoff. I'm assuming they had a mechanical issue and didn't want to tell the passengers that. It's not an airport delay, her flight was supposed to depart at 4:59, and their CLE-ATL flight that was scheduled for 7:43 was only four minutes late, and will arrive 35 minutes before the one she's on.

So what is the procedure for deicing an airliner before it departs?
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If there is any sort of ice or contaminate in the engine inlets or on the blades themselves, the engine cannot be started until that situation is rectified.

Been a while since I’ve been to CLE, but I do remember that they have a designated deicing area and I don’t ever recall getting deiced at the gate. This is probably because the deicing area has a fluid reclaim system that whatever fluid comes off the airplane, goes into a drain and gets recycled. Deicing a transport category airplane using type I fluid can take hundreds of gallons of fluid and deicing fluid ain’t cheap. We charged $20/gal for it when I worked as a line tech at an FBO.

I could very well see a situation here where there was snow/ice inside the engines, CLE doesn’t deice at the gate and the plane needs to be towed to the deice pad to get rid of that contaminate in the engines. Whoever tows the airplane won’t do it with pax on board for liability reasons (maybe pilots couldn’t be brake riders or it’s against their FOM… pushback is different than brake riding all over the airport). Or, the pilots could’ve entered the ice in the engines as a MX write up and you can’t take pax on a plane and taxi around with an open write up (at least you can’t at my shop).

“Deicing” as an explanation is probably accurate but almost guaranteed that a lot more is going on beneath the surface.
 
Living in Texas most of my life, I'm used to staying where it's warm and avoiding ice. The few times I've left DFW in a plane that needed to be deiced, we had to taxi someplace and wait in line to have the stuff sprayed on. So I was amazed leaving Chicago one winter in what appeared to be to be a blizzard (but the locals advised was normal snowfall). I expected long delays, but everyone was leaving on time. There were trucks, like hummingbirds on flowers, going from gate to gate hosing down every plane just in time for them to go.
 
Here's the timeline: The flight from CLE to ATL was scheduled for a 4:59 departure. The aircraft arrived at CLE from ATL at approximately 4 PM, which was very close to on time. Boarding was slightly late, and Delta revised the departure time to 6 PM without any further information. The plane was loaded and ready to go, but did not depart. Sometime after 6 PM, the first officer came on and announced that the airplane needed to be deiced and everyone would have to deplane, and it would be gone for an hour, at which time they would reboard.

That happened, they were ready to go at 7:45, and were again delayed. One reason given was to remove the checked bags of people who did not reboard. Also during that time. The 7:43 PM Delta flight to Atlanta left more or less on time, and was in the air 22 minutes after leaving the gate. They finally pushed back and taxied out at around 8:20. The first officer came on again and announced that there was a mechanical issue and that they were returning to the gate, which they did. Not too long after they returned to the gate, the first officer announced that there was a possibility that they could still depart, but anyone who wanted to deplane could do so. Finally, somewhere around 9:15, they did push back again, this time they departed and arrived in ATL at 10:55.
 
FormerHangie said:
Here's the timeline: The flight from CLE to ATL was scheduled for a 4:59 departure. The aircraft arrived at CLE from ATL at approximately 4 PM, which was very close to on time. Boarding was slightly late, and Delta revised the departure time to 6 PM without any further information. The plane was loaded and ready to go, but did not depart. Sometime after 6 PM, the first officer came on and announced that the airplane needed to be deiced and everyone would have to deplane, and it would be gone for an hour, at which time they would reboard.

That happened, they were ready to go at 7:45, and were again delayed. One reason given was to remove the checked bags of people who did not reboard. Also during that time. The 7:43 PM Delta flight to Atlanta left more or less on time, and was in the air 22 minutes after leaving the gate. They finally pushed back and taxied out at around 8:20. The first officer came on again and announced that there was a mechanical issue and that they were returning to the gate, which they did. Not too long after they returned to the gate, the first officer announced that there was a possibility that they could still depart, but anyone who wanted to deplane could do so. Finally, somewhere around 9:15, they did push back again, this time they departed and arrived in ATL at 10:55.
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Sometimes when it rains, it pours. The pilots are not the ones dealing with the customer service aftermath when things go south - there is no motivation for us to intentionally mislead anyone. What possible reason would a pilot have to blame a mechanical issue on deicing?
 
On my plane if there is any kind of problem or warning message associated with the anti-icing system the plane has to be taken out by maintenance for a runup and retest of the system. Possible the problem was both related to icing and maintenance. The intricacies of delays like these can be hard to explain, then when customer service tries to relay the information to passengers it turns into a game of telephone. That's just one example--who knows what really happened. But it doesn't have to mean people are lying.
 
dmspilot said:
On my plane if there is any kind of problem or warning message associated with the anti-icing system the plane has to be taken out by maintenance for a runup and retest of the system. Possible the problem was both related to icing and maintenance. The intricacies of delays like these can be hard to explain, then when customer service tries to relay the information to passengers it turns into a game of telephone. That's just one example--who knows what really happened. But it doesn't have to mean people are lying.
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That is likely the case. The crew and customer service usually try to dumb down the answer for the average passenger that couldn't tell you the difference between a fuselage and a landing gear.
 
Pinecone said:
"tarmac" REALLY. On an aviation forum?
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Get over it. The language changes with time. Otherwise we'd be speaking like Chaucer.

FWIW,
tarmac
noun [ U ]
an area of ground covered with a hard surface, esp. the areas of an airport where aircraft park, land, and take off:
The plane was damaged on landing when it slid off the tarmac.
(Definition of tarmac from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/tarmac​
 
If the engines needed to be deiced, then I can agree that towing it to be deiced is indeed deicing. Fixing something with the anti-ice is a mechanical issue, and to say the airplane needs deicing is not truthful.
 
I was on an Amtrak once, close to the destination, had a problem and delayed 6 hours stationary on the track. I felt as though I was imprisoned. The feeling is pretty terrible to not be offered the option to leave.
 
Half Fast said:
DELTA - "Doesn't Ever Leave The Airport"
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A friend of ours flew up from Raleigh to Newark on Delta yesterday evening. Her Delta flight was delayed, then delayed again. The gate agent announced after the second delay that Newark was expecting six feet of snow and they couldn't guarantee the flight would make it in at all.

When she called with the news, I found it odd, since we live 30 minutes from EWR and our forecast called for 0" of snow. Zero, zilch, nada. It takes at least two years for EWR to see six feet of snow total.

I read her the TAF and suggested she ask the gate agent if she wanted to change her story. The gate agent only doubled down, saying 'the pilot told us 6 feet of snow!'.

The flight did make it in, slightly less than two hours late. At least the airport pickup went smoothly, since the zero, zilch, nada snow forecast had been spot on.
 
FormerHangie said:
My daughter is flying...
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FormerHangie said:
They were lying.
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GaryM said:
A friend of ours flew up...The gate [said] 'the pilot told us 6 feet of snow!'.
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Not saying anything about the veracity of these stories I hear, but why is the daughter or friend believed unconditionally, and it's the airline or gate agent that's lying or doesn't understand?

Why can't it be "my daughter said... but that doesn't make sense, so maybe she misunderstood what's going on."? Or "the gate agent said this, but maybe she misunderstood the pilot?"

Why would a pilot on a flight to EWR tell someone that there was going to be 6 feet of snow there? I grew up near EWR and EWR isn't SYR. Six feet of snow in one fall would make national news. Half the people on that plane probably lived in the tri-state area and would know if a once-in-a-century snow storm was bearing down on their home. The other half have a phone with a weather app that they can immediately see if there's a snowstorm on the east coast.

So, we have a pilot giving information to a gate agent, who gives information to the passengers, who tells @GaryM. You don't think that somewhere in that grade school game of "telephone" some of the message got garbled? Either the gate agent misunderstood the pilot, or the friend misunderstood the gate agent. I'd give even odds on either scenario.

Just because information gets misunderstood, or the passenger doesn't understand the message doesn't automatically mean some nefarious plot is going on. Like @kayoh190 said, what possible reason does the pilot have to lie to the passengers? If there's a weather problem, there's a weather problem. If it's mechanical, it's mechanical. And like @dmspilot said, you'll try to dumb it down so people understand, and even then, sometimes it gets misconstrued.

Reason #7423 why I love my "passengers" versus my Delta, American and United brethren. That and no snarky comments about my miserable landings.
 
Sluggo63 said:
...doesn't automatically mean some nefarious plot is going on.
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But it's an airline. Evil incarnate. Airlines are nefarious. Airlines beat up doctors. Airlines break guitars. Airlines cram passengers in like sardines. Airlines charge stupid baggage fees. Airlines have fare logic that no one understands. Airlines overbook and deny boarding to paid passengers.

Airlines have earned distrust. Why should anyone trust anything said by any airline?
 
Half Fast said:
But it's an airline. Evil incarnate. Airlines are nefarious. Airlines beat up doctors. Airlines break guitars. Airlines cram passengers in like sardines. Airlines charge stupid baggage fees. Airlines have fare logic that no one understands. Airlines overbook and deny boarding to paid passengers.

Airlines have earned distrust. Why should anyone trust anything said by any airline?
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You had me in the first half, I really thought you were being sarcastic. Then, I think you weren't...

I mean, I love a good airline bashing as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't want facts to get into the way.

The Chicago Airport Police beat up a passenger (the why and how it got there has been rehashed here ad infinitum), not the airline.

You don't have to be crammed in an airliner, just but a business class seat. The seats are that way, mostly, because the public wants it that way. Everyone complains about airline seats, but when it come time to buy a ticket they go to Expedia and "sort by cheapest." There were airlines who offered all business class seats (Midwest Express) and although they had a great product, it failed because people are mostly unwilling to pay for more room.

As far as breaking guitars and bumping passengers, there are pretty detailed stats for that. and the truth doesn't always match up to people's perceptions.

For the past decade, the airlines involuntarily denied boarding to 360,185 passengers out of 6,808,021,040 passengers flown. That's 0.0053%. I really don't think that's the huge issue people make it out to be. I get it, if you're one of the 0.0053%, it absolutely sucks, but the chances of it happening are pretty small, especially now after Dr. Dao where the airlines are willing to really pay out some cash to get people to get voluntarily bumped.
(Source: https://www.bts.gov/content/passeng...-largest-us-air-carriersathousands-passengers)

And as for luggage, there is no breakdown for just "damaged" just "mishandled" which includes delayed, lost, and damaged, and that comes out to about 3 bags "mishandled" for every 1,000 passengers.
(Source: https://www.bts.gov/content/mishandled-baggage-reports-filed-passengers-largest-us-air-carriersa)

As far as the fare pricing... who the F knows how that works. Someone could probably get a Nobel prize if they ever figured that out.

I'm no airline apologist, especially since I don't fly passengers anymore. But I am a very frequent flyer, holding pretty high status on two of the big three US airlines. I fly as a passenger a lot, and have rarely seen airlines "lying" about delays, mechanicals, etc.

What I do see is a passenger sitting in the EWR terminal loudly proclaiming that the airline is lying because they said the weather was causing a delay, when clearly the weather in NJ is beautiful and so is the weather at the destination. Meanwhile, there is a line of storms shutting down 2/3 of all the south and west departure gates out of the east coast airports. I've even seen that logic posted by pilots here on PoA. More often than not, Hanlon rules the day.
 
Sluggo63 said:
…There were airlines who offered all business class seats (Midwest Express) and although they had a great product, it failed...
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I shed a tear the day that airline died. Best passenger service ever.

Like a Phoenix, the brand is trying to be revived again.
 
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