Winter Wonderland? Hardly...

Compared to the Arctic Blast that ripped through North America a couple of weeks ago, my experience with airport winter operations has been fairly limited. And while a little snow and ice can be treacherous, the amount of frozen water that was dumped over there was downright deadly.

Here’s a picture of me “playing” in the snow*.

And here are some videos of professionals battling extreme conditions.

As an aside, recently I had to go through Annex 14 Volume I and check off Australia’s adherence to its standards and recommended practices. That is almost 1500 individual provisions that needed checking against our new rule set. Luckily, I could skip large sections due to Australia’s climate. One such section was the physical standards for de-icing facilities.

But overseas, cold climate airports have large dedicated spaces for de- & anti-icing activities. They have some cool gear too.

And one more video. This one is a very short video from the Smithsonian.

Stay safe out there folks.

* We were actually removing some FOD from the runway. It took about 40 of us to walk the whole runway to make sure we had it all.

ChatGPT Prologue: Another post that was only inspired by the bot. But I swear, I’m getting to some cool stuff in the next couple of days.