Hacker News Reader

Comment by api_or_ipa | Hacker News Reader

Deicing fluid is expensive, $24/gallon or more, and an airliner might a few hundred gallons or more to deice. Also, when deicing is needed, it's fair to say _lots of airplanes_ are in contention for a limited amount of deicing equipment leading to costly delays which can compound and cause system-wide consequences. Suffice to say, any improvements to deicing aircraft quicker and more efficiently certainly has strong economic incentive.

If buying this software + some oculuses results in even a couple of minutes faster deicing or a few gallons of fluid saved on each airplane this would be an easy sell to airport FBOs.

View on HN

The difficult part is in training. Training in proper conditions is really hard because when those conditions are present, it's all hands on deck and the instructors can't be instructing because they're out actually deicing planes. So there's a bottleneck for new deicers to come on board. Plus the cost of the fluid (and the highly specialized vehicles), like you mentioned. The use case is a bit more clear compared to for welding, when anyone can just pick one up from Harbor Freight for < $150.

  > The difficult part is in training. Training in proper conditions is really hard because when those conditions are present, it's all hands on deck and the instructors can't be instructing because they're out actually deicing planes.

I've never seen it this way. In the US military, de-icing duty falls on a minimally-trained E-1/E-2. We get about an hour or two training that includes some grave warnings.

While it's inculcated in you from day one not to kill aircrews or crash planes, about the only de-icing training you get is to make sure there's no residual ice on the wings and especially it's moving surfaces (eg. flaps).

Source: I spent countless hours de-icing large military aircraft as a one-striper, in an open bucket, in blizzards. It's an experience.

Did any of your training focus on controlling cost the way a commercial airport would?

No, quite the contrary. The emphasis was “go hog wild, do a good job”. No mention of budgets or saving money ever.

That and the nature of the workers’ relationships to the employer are the meaningful differences.

> We get about an hour or two training that includes some grave warnings.

Can you share examples of those warnings?

Roughly: “If you don’t do a thorough job, you will kill the flight crew and they will not make it home to their families.

If the first part doesn’t bother you, you’ll also be court martialed and in a brig for a long, long time.”

Not the person you’re replying to, but a little common sense would imply warnings along the line of “if you don’t do this properly, a crew of innocent people fall out of the sky and fucking die whilst screaming all the way down”

I deiced airplanes at newark airport during college.

The deicing company just grabbed anyone they can practically off the streets. Training was 4 hours on a saturday in the fall. In the winter, folks would slam into planes all the time and someone would have to come out and look at it and make sure it was ok.

There were no "instructors". At the time, the 3 main airports around NYC was the same group of people so it wasnt just EWR. Its alot more refined now, (this was 15-20 years ago) but from what I hear, its not much better.

How was the pay?

I do it now. $20 / hour here. Depends on location. Pay is a slight premium above McDonald’s but not much.

Yea, back in ~2004 it was I think $16 the first year, and if you were good, $18 bucks after the second year. If you did it for > 5 years you became something like a supervisor.

Clueless question: couldn't they put up a mock-up of a plane (or several of different shapes and sizes) on a field, and use a cheaper liquid with similar properties, for the training purposes? Maybe The last thing would be the limit of needing to wait for cold weather to train new sprayers.

The parent poster makes training sound a lot more complicated than it really is. I de-ice planes currently. The training was about an hour in the classroom, 20 minutes of how the truck works and then a trainer in the headset the first couple (live-actual) planes you do.

Alot of airports used to make it to cut costs. Some also had special drain systems for reclaiming the fluid. Others had a subcontractor company come and suck it up as you sprayed the planes.

There was also type 1 and type 2: Type 1 was the watery antifreeze like stuff, type 2 was jelly-like meant to spray on the plane as it was waiting to take off to keep the ice from reforming. Type 2 was much more expensive than type 1 and the first thing you learn is to not use type 2 unless told to.

There was also IR tents at some of the NYC area airports but they only served planes smaller than a 737. I think the port authority removed them about 10 years ago.

I fly out of JFK pretty regularly in regional jets and the IR tents are still there - though I’ve never been on a plane there that got anything other than conventional deicing. Unsure if they’re actually active.

Can’t find any info on the IR deicers getting decommissioned. Newark’s could handle a 757 and JFK’s could handle a 787 and 747.

> $24/gallon or more

Is that what the airport pays for fresh stuff or what the airline pays?

I understand it that bigger airports with snowier weather will recycle it. Not that they can recapture it all...

There was a guy at where I worked that would pump it from the deicing truck into the fluid recycling truck when no one was looking. He owned the recycling truck and also worked in the deicing operation (this was jersey...)

Eventually he got busted.

Sounds about right haha

I get the feeling that this should be the job of (giant) robots or drones. The number of aircraft models is quite limited (relatively speaking, compared to, say, cars on the road), and the aircrafts should all have well-known geometry that robots or drones can be programmed against.

The problem is accurately perceiving the remaining snow/ice coverage on the airplane, unless you have a guaranteed-clear-on-first-pass solution (you don't). Sure, you can get it "mostly" clear with current CV, but you have to be absolutely clear or serious incidents will result (some aircraft suffer significant aerodynamic consequences from ice less than 1mm thick). Neither airport operators nor airlines will seriously consider a robotic solution unless it outperforms human operators, and the potential liability is high barrier to entry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com