How to Deal With Icing in Aviation

Flying

• 1

  Gather information about the weather conditions. Check weather forecasts along the route you filed in your flight plan. Listen for pilot reports or speak to other pilots arriving from the areas you plan to fly through.

• 2

  Avoid any and all areas with weather conditions that cause icing if your plane is not equipped with modern deicing equipment. Visible clouds or precipitation mixed with air temperatures below 0 degree Celsius will cause structural icing.

• 3

  Remove any ice or frost from the airfoils before takeoff.

• 4

  Avoid taxiing through water, mud, slush or snow in cold weather. In cases where this is unavoidable, conduct a preflight check for freedom of movement in the controls.

• 5

  Use deicing equipment for thin layers of ice.

• 6

  Exit the icing layer with an altitude or course change when the deicing equipment becomes ineffective.

• 7

  Increase airspeed beyond normal operating levels when passing through an icing layer to avoid a stall.

• 8

  Read instruments with extra caution if your plane is not equipped with a pitot-static system deicer. Icing is known to cause erroneous instrument readings.

• 9

  Avoid radical maneuvers when the plane has a thick ice layer. Icing drastically reduces aerodynamic efficiency.

• 10

  Fly your landing approach with power.

Weather-Specific Tips

• 11

  Change to a flight level above freezing or below -10 degrees Celsius in stratiform clouds. Change altitude to exit the clouds. Extensive horizontal rime icing is common in this type of cloud cover.

• 12

  Change altitude early in frontal freezing rain. Some higher altitudes may be above freezing and lower altitudes may also provide an escape from this particular cause of icing.

• 13

  Skirt cumuliform clouds whenever possible. These clouds produce rapid icing in temperature layers between 0 degrees and -15 degrees Celsius.