"Mike Rapoport" wrote
I see this all the time too but I don't really buy off on it. I don't hear
of known-ice piston 135 charter and freight flights not making their
destinations becasue of ice.

Yeah, but you do hear about one falling out of the sky every once in a
while.

I think that if you have a known ice airplane
and everything is in proper working order, you should be capable of flying
in 99% of icing.

The trick, of course, is recognizing the 1% you can't fly in before
it's too late.

This doesn't mean that there won't be tense moments and
obviously having more performance is better but I don't see why any known
ice airplane isn't adequate to the job.

A good friend of mine has lots of experience in known-ice piston twins
(acquired on the way up to the airlines) and gave me some advice when
it looked like I might be moving into one (when it looked like I might
have to move North for professional reasons). His position is that
flying a piston airplane in icing conditions requires careful
attention to maintenance (his experience is that most piston deice
systems are poorly maintained) and a significantly greater level of
weather savvy and skill (relative to flying a jet, which requires none
- all icing problem go away at 400 kts indicated) but it can be done,
and will allow the completion of the vast majority of missions in
icing conditions.

I suspect it's similar to the Stormscope vs. RADAR deal. I hear
people say that a Stromscope is just a way of knowing that there's
stuff out there and it's time to land, not a way of flying around
T-storms. In reality, I live in T-storm central and have yet to
cancel a flight because of T-storms. I have made some deviations, but
so does a RADAR-equipped airplane. I have had some tense moments, and
obviously having RADAR would have been better. Of course this is
predicated on the Stormscope working properly. Proper operation means
that when the sky is dead (meaning the air is smooth as glass, and any
clouds are stratiform) you can fly around for hours without seeing a
dot on the most sensitive setting. In reality, most avionics shops
are not competent to perform such an installation and less than 20% of
spherics devices function that way.

These are simply specific instances of a more general rule - if you
want to fly difficult weather in less capable equipment, you need to
be a more capable pilot, but it can usually be done.

Michael