A Real Pain In the Ice: Why Aircraft Deicing Sucks and What Can Be Done About It
By: Cliff Atkins
Let’s discuss a solution. The solution is JetSocks, a simple system designed to prevent the need to deice airplanes on mornings that find everything covered in frost. Think of every frost-covered morning as an opportunity to eliminate an entire process that has plagued the airline industry since its birth nearly a century ago. The JetSocks Delay Prevention System (DPS) does just that. In a matter of minutes, an airplane can be protected from the formation of frost during overnight sits, which means it is clean and ready to fly when needed, allowing for on-time arrivals on mornings that used to mean deicing and delays. Additionally, on the mornings after nights of heavy snow and freezing rain, the JetSocks DPS can help mitigate the impact of snow and ice accumulation on parked airplanes. What this means for passengers is on time flights, a cleaner environment, and none of the “why is that guy in the bucket spraying that bright green crap on this airplane? Whaddya mean it won’t fly if he misses a spot?†anxiety. What does this mean for airlines? A lot. Let’s take a look at why.
The problem to this solution is called “deicing.†Nearly everyone is familiar with the concept of aircraft deicing during winter-time airline travel. Whether or not they are conversant with the “down and dirty†details of the process, it is, at the very least, a procedure that travelers hate, as they should. Delayed arrivals, extra time stuck in a cramped airplane with a less-than-desirable seatmate, and the plain uneasiness that seeing a man in a cherry picker spraying a strange, hot liquid on the airplane evokes. This is just the tip of the de-iceberg.
What lies beneath the surface: First, there’s the issue of profit that hangs over the airline industry like a bad case of heartburn. If everything doesn’t go smoothly, a flight is likely to lose money. Flight crews (pilots and flight attendants), gates at an airport, ground service equipment (GSE) such as tugs, belt loaders for bags, etc., and the airplanes themselves are scheduled down to the minute. If one of these things ends up out of position, the house of cards comes down. Just how violently it does so is yet another variable in a highly dynamic business environment. Keep these things in mind as you read and remember, hiccups cost money. Lots of it. In an industry that runs on profit margins as meager as 1 to 1.5 percent, there is not much extra cash to go around.
Let’s continue with the the biggie: Delays. If you board an airplane that is covered in frost and you expect an on-time arrival, you will be disappointed. Consider, too, that a late arrival in the morning may very well mean missed connections for dozens of passengers, which will cascade a heap of other costs and troubles on to the airline. Once an airplane is late, it will have a hard time catching up, meaning that whatever problems the initial delay created will be visited on every flight this airplane makes that day. On-time arrivals at the end of a flight that had the be deiced almost never occur in nature. One reason is the bottleneck principle. Deicing is typically accomplished at a specific location on the airport. Your airplane boards, starts up, and taxis to what is known as the “deice pad,†at which point it will be shut back down, usually left without electricity or air conditioning (alone in the dark with strangers hasn’t been fun since college). Next, a dedicated crew will spray the airplane with aircraft deicing fluid (ADF), a process that generally takes at least twenty minutes. The process is simple enough, but here’s the rub: If your airplane needs to be sprayed, then so does every other airplane on the airport. Now things begin to unravel. Imagine yourself ten, fifteen, twenty or more deep in a line of airplanes that each need to complete a twenty minute (at best) task. This requirement takes an airport that may have a half a dozen different ways to get airplanes to a runway and make an hourglass out of it: one way out. It’s rush hour traffic at its worst, with a twenty-car pile up to make it interesting. Just to cover my bases, if you have seen an airplane deiced on the gate, you will probably not see that happen again. The EPA will see to this because deicing fluid is just bad for the environment (more on that in a bit).
Now look at the ramifications to staffing in a typical deicing scenario. Flight crew schedules are overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and in most cases tightened even further by union contracts. I want to qualify any further explanation with the fact that these rules exist for passenger safety and should never be a point of contention (trust me, you want a rested crew). With that in mind, consider what the scheduling issues are. Delays mean a greater likelihood that a flight crew, possibly your flight crew, will run out of time to legally work at the end of their day. It is not unusual these days for a crew to be scheduled so close to the maximum allowable duty time that burning an hour in the morning to deice will cause them to be unable to legally work the last part of their schedule. This may ruin your day hours and hours after the fact. Delays beget delays. Just as with the airplane itself, rarely will you see a delayed crew finish the day on time. Because of delays, airlines created a staffing model that keeps pilots and flight attendants available in case they become necessary, and calling a reserve crew out will most likely mean yet another delay. I could elaborate on this staffing problem and include gate agents, the guys that smash your bags, and on and on, but the simple fact is that if a deicing program is in effect, it is an all-hands-on-deck situation. And all hands can expect extra work. What does this mean? More money spent on executing your flight home and a greater chance that the staffing model will fail on you.
Ground Service Equipment (GSE) is the next area to probe. GSE are all the devices that help service an airplane and the particular service items in question here are the deice trucks that have tanks in them that heat, transport, and deliver ADF to airplanes that have to be deiced. They have a bucket attached to the end of a boom from which someone sprays the airplane. They would make great Tonka toys, but in actual size, alas, they are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and are yet another item that must be staffed and fueled. In my experience, they sometimes even catch on fire, making for sporty fun on the deice pad. Picture a flaming, unmanned truck surrounded by airplanes full of passengers at one of the busiest airports in the Northeastern United States. It ended well enough for me to tell funny stories about, but it could have been a catastrophe. All part of the deicing picture. Consider, too, the amount of energy required to heat thousands of gallons of ADF in a freezing climate. Without getting into the complicated part, it can take anywhere between one hundred and five hundred gallons to deice a small airliner depending on the type and level of contamination. Certain processes beyond simple deicing require even more fluid, but are outside the scope of this discussion.
Now, about the environment. Hot as we are on the subject of GSE, let’s see how it applies. GSE burns fuel the same way your car does. The main difference is that most GSE is old and far less efficient than your car; they have high-power engines with no emissions testing and no concern for MPG. These vehicles also require maintenance that when multiplied over an entire fleet adds up rapidly. While there will always be a need for this type of equipment, the less you have to use it, the fewer resources it requires, which means less fuel burned and reduced emissions from the airport. That about settles the issue of GSE, but not wasted fuel. Along with being shiny, making noise, and causing over-sized sunglasses to fly out of pilots’ shirt pockets, airplanes also burn fuel. They are more efficient than ever, but compared to cars, airplanes burn fuel at an obscene rate. With one engine running at idle (the usual situation for waiting in line for the deice pad), a typical regional jet will burn roughly 60 gallons of jet fuel every hour. Think about it like this: A stock 2009 Honda Civic will burn a little less than 2 gallons an hour doing 70 MPH. So when you see a stack of regional jets (the smallest of jet airliners) waiting in line to be deiced, you can make the following equation: For every 10 regional jets waiting in line, you could run more than 300 Honda Civics on the highway for an hour. And that’s if those regional jets are burning the minimum amount of fuel possible. Run both of their engines at idle in that line and you can double our number of possible Honda Civics on the highway. Run the Auxiliary Power Unit and we increase that number even more. The stinger on the tail of the wasted fuel story is that only 10 jets in the line to be deiced at an airport of any size at all is a dream come true. The morning rush will usually see lines of dozens of airplanes at busier airports, all wasting fuel awaiting deicing, which costs money. Wasted dollars, wasted emissions.
The environmental concern deepens with the very nature of Aircraft Deicing Fluid (ADF). ADF is made of one of two forms of glycol, which you may know as anti-freeze, the very same stuff that goes in the radiator of your car. It acts as a freeze-point depressant that keeps water in its liquid form at reduced temperatures. When glycol is mixed with water, corrosion inhibitors, lubricants, and a few other choice ingredients, we refer to it as deicing fluid. Great stuff, right? Well, yes. . . with a big “but.†ADF’s big “but†is the fact that it is toxic. ADF will kill almost any animal that drinks it, but that’s not the worst thing about it. Unless provisions are made, once sprayed out of the truck, ADF runs in to the same drains as rain water and therefore into a local watershed. Glycol consumes the oxygen in water so voraciously that nothing can live in it, no fish, no plants, nothing that also wants oxygen in order to survive. ADF in surface waters is also attributed to issues with drinking water and air quality. To counteract this, larger airports have dedicated deice pads on which they conduct all deicing procedures as mentioned earlier. These deice pads are equipped to reclaim spent ADF and store it for treatment, the cost of which is partially sent back to the airlines. These pads costs tens of millions of dollars to construct and maintain. Even still, the EPA estimates that approximately 21 million gallons of spent ADF are sent in to the America’s surface waters every year.
As you can see, aircraft deicing is extremely wasteful, as well as hazardous to both people and Mother Nature. It is, however, necessary. During wintry weather with snow and ice, there will always be a need to deice airplanes in this way. Deicing has been done without any change in the process for decades. It keeps passengers safe and has yet to be easily replaced. There is much room for improvement, though. This opportunity arises, ironically enough, on mornings without what we typically think of as winter weather. There is no snow, no freezing rain, but you still see airplanes deicing. The issue on these days is frost. An airplane is not airworthy as long as the wings and tail (the flying surfaces) are contaminated with frost. On any morning that you would walk out and find frost on your lawn or on your car, you can bet that there are airplanes deicing at the airport on an otherwise beautiful winter morning. Dozens, if not hundreds, of these mornings occur every year in every state in the U.S. This is where the JetSocks Delay Prevention System (DPS) comes in. For airlines, the JetSocks DPS means a healthier bottom line, improved on-time performance, happier passengers, and a reduced environmental footprint. Pretty good.
Cliff Atkins is a second generation professional pilot with more than 13 years of aviation industry experience and is the Chief Operating Officer of JetSocks, Inc.
References:
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/noframes/25870.shtml
www.epa.gov/safewater/sourcewater/pubs/fs_swpp_deicingair.pdf
Tags: Airline Delays, de-icing, deicing, delays, frost