No More Snow Jobs From the Feds, OK? : Get cracking on better ways to de-ice airliners and save lives
When ice accumulation triggered the highly publicized crash of an Air Florida Boeing 737 in Washington, D.C., 10 years ago, the federal government issued guidelines that were supposed to protect the traveling public by improving winter safety procedures for commercial airliners.
But after a decade, 23 more ice-related crashes and more than 100 other deaths, it’s fair to say that the Federal Aviation Administration has failed to learn its lesson--a lesson that just might have prevented last month’s crash of USAir Flight 405, which killed 27 people at New York’s La Guardia Airport.
Although what went wrong with Flight 405 has yet to be determined conclusively, indications are that, once again, icing was the cause. Ice is particularly dangerous because even minute amounts can distort wing shape, thus reducing an aircraft’s lift.
The FAA requires airliners to be ice-free before takeoff. Planes at U.S. airports are treated with Type I de-icing fluid, a combination of hot water and glycol that’s similar to automobile antifreeze.
Unfortunately, the protection of the fluid does not last long in severe weather. After the 1989 crash of an Air Ontario jet, the Canadian government concluded that in a snowstorm, the Type I de-icing protection lasts only five minutes or so. It therefore recommended that Type II, a more potent substance used often and successfully at European airports, be applied along with Type I to prevent ice from re-forming quickly after it has been removed.
That suggestion seems to have not been absorbed by U.S. aviation administrators. Nor apparently was an exhaustive study by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board after the crash of a Continental jetliner at Denver in 1987. That report called on the FAA to expedite adoption of the European method.
Instead, the FAA maintained a policy that allowed pilots to make judgments about whether their planes were ice-free.
USAir Flight 405 was de-iced twice by crews at the terminal. But, before the plane was cleared for takeoff, it had waited 35 minutes on a runway in below-freezing temperatures and driving snow. During that wait, at nighttime, the pilots visually checked the wings from the cockpit at distances that ranged to more than 50 feet--and concluded there were no problems. Such visual scrutiny is imprecise even during daylight. Add poor visibility caused by darkness and bad weather and you have the ingredients for disaster.
FAA Associate Administrator Anthony Broderick announced last week that a conference on de-icing will be held in May and new de-icing procedures will be in effect next winter. But the consistent failure of the FAA to address the icing problem and the agency’s glacial pace in this issue are unlikely to reassure air travelers.
The lessons, we think, are fundamental: Type I de-icing fluid cannot always protect planes that have to sit on the runway for long periods in severe weather; pilots and ground crews cannot always detect ice formation; European methods that have prevented ice-related crashes for more than a decade must be employed here.
The FAA now must de-ice its bureaucracy, as well as American planes.
