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Comment by zamnos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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  > 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.

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

Can you share examples of those warnings?

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”

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.”

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.

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.

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