Glaze Ice

On Feb 2, 7:38*am, Tom De Moor
wrote:
In article ,
says...



METAR EBOS 021550Z 22009KT 8000 FEW020 SCT032 01/M01 Q1017 R08/290095
TEMPO 3000 -SHSNRA BKN012=

OK sure - but one should surely reading something more into that temp
and dew point. *Too close for me. *What do others think?

SHSNRA

Showers Snow Rain.

In our club are now two camps: 1 person, convinced that dry snow will
not cause freezing ice and all the rest who don't know the differance by
sight between a cloud full of dry snow or freezing rain and who will
chicken out by not flying through.

I am with the rest ;-)

Where is the summer staying?

Tom De Moor

With nearly a lifetime of flying real IFR in light aircraft, I've
found almost all generalities about ice accumulating on aircraft to be
wrong on occasion. Ultimately, you get what you get. If you have a
well thought out escape route, you'll probably survive. If not.....

Examples:

Ice CAN accumulate in clear air. It's usually Graupel but can be just
very light supercooled mist. Neither block visibility enough to be
easily seen from a distance.

The kind of freezing rain described by the first poster is rare but
almost always fatal to an aircraft. As a result there are few 1st
person stories of encounters with freezing rain.

The only real ice removal strategy for aircraft is to find warm air -
FAST. De-Ice equipment just buys a little time. Simply recording
temperature layers while climbing has saved me several times.

Usually, but not always, if the air temperature is -10C or lower,
virtually all supercooled water droplets have already frozen out and
the resulting snow will just bounce off the airplane. I've seen
significant ice at -30C.

Icing is always worse over mountains.

It's amazing how much ice you can pick up flying through a cooling
tower plume.