Icing

Hello! I am sitting in Rockford, IL, where we had some minor work done on the airplane (the passenger seats were getting stuck in the aisle - and FAA regulations require that during takeoff and landing they are at the most outboard position as to not block the exits).

So I was taking advantage of our time here to clean off my flash drives and I found a bunch of pictures that I took this winter. We were on a flight to New Jersey when we had a small maintenance issue that we diverted into our headquarters/maintenance base for. We needed to burn off some fuel (you can take off at a higher weight that you can land sometimes, and sometimes the length of the runway determines that you must be lighter than you had originally planned), so we did some turns in holding. When we landed, I took pictures of the accumulated icing...

Ice on the airframe reduces the lift produced by the airplane because it disturbs the airflow. That is why airplanes need to get deiced before takeoff. The statistic I remember is: even a light coating of frost can reduce lift by 30%! For safety reasons, better to do it than not.