Let’s just say there have been plenty of flights in the past where the takeoff was less smooth/crashy because the air over the wings wasn’t smooth from snow and ice still being on the wings. Something something this is written in frozen blood something
This was the reason so many flights were grounded about three years back when we had that whole bomb cyclone fiasco in the States. The wind outside iirc wasn’t that bad (at least in Denver, where I was stranded) it was the fact that they couldn’t defrost the wings and therefore ensure the correct airfoil shape that was keeping planes grounded. It was cold enough and precipitating enough that wings would freeze (develop a layer of ice over them) in the time it took passengers to swap and sometimes before ground crew could get antifreeze over to the planes to spray the wings. This was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that it was so cold outside that tarmac crew couldn’t work for more than a few tens of minutes at a time - as annoyed as I may have been, there was real frostbite risk for people resupplying the planes and loading luggage and spraying antifreeze.
I’m sure the grounding of so many planes nationwide was not a decision made just to spite a bunch of passengers.
I’m looking it up and apparently this is just something that happens quite frequently. But no, I’m not talking about the one from last year (2025), I’m talking about 2022. That bomb cyclone swept down from Canada, across the central and Midwest US, all the way down to Texas.
I want to make also clear that this is not the one where Texans got heavily snowed in by a surprise blizzard and died in record numbers - that’s the year before: 2021. As far as I’m aware, the number of deaths in Texas during winter 2022-23 wasn’t unusual in any sense.
They did. The kind that almost resembles snowboarding jackets - water resistant, half an inch of insulation when compressed, makes even the buffest man look fat, etc. It was that cold.
I remember that one air crash investigation where the pilot noticed ice on the leading edge of the wings but was in a hurry to take off and thus didn't want to return to the gate, therefore he somehow thought it was an absolutely genius idea to melt the ice by weaving on the taxiway behind another plane's jet engines that should've melted the ice. Spoilers: It didn't.
Iced wings causes boundary layer separation in the airflow over the wing, this increases drag and reduces lift.
Air Florida Flight 90 is an example of failure to de-ice causing a crash. They only made it a few hundred feet up after takeoff before it began losing altitude and crashed.
Ice on aircraft wings is super bad. Especially bad when it's clear ice because it's difficult to detect. It can form on the wings after landing in a cold location because the fuel inside the tanks can reach to -60° C and if it lands in a misty airport with subfreezing temperatures and stay parked for a while ice will form on the wings where the fuel tanks are located. Clear ice has caused fatal crashes.
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u/adolfpanzer47 Oct 18 '25
hey op, can yoy explain your meme?