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MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Every day, hundreds of planes land and take off from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, often during ice or snow storms.
You may have heard the pilot announce they need to de-ice the aircraft before take-off. So how does de-icing work? Delta Air Lines gave WCCO’s Heather Brown a close-up look.
If you’ve flown Delta out of MSP Airport from October through March, there’s a good chance Corey Ellis has de-iced your plane.
“Been de-icing for 7 years,” Ellis said. “It’s one of the most important parts of the airport operation. It allows the plane to fly safe. You don’t want to fly with snow on your plane.”
You also don’t want ice or even frost. It can disrupt the airflow, which affects the ability for lift.
On a recent morning, Ellis let us in his truck parked on the de-icing pad near the runway. That’s where he operates a crane with a nozzle that shoots out an orange-tinted mixture of water and propylene glycol. It’s heated to a minimum of 160 degrees.
“It melts a lot faster, it slides off,” Ellis said.
They start at the nose and end at the tail. Ellis says think of it like a car wash. The first step is the wash.
(credit: CBS)
The whole process starts with a pilot request to Delta’s communication tower. The pilot will always makes the call about de-icing. The entire process can be as fast as two to three minutes.
“And then if there’s snow falling, we apply type 4, and that’s like the wax, so it keeps everything from sticking,” he said.
This season, Delta has de-iced 6,000 planes at MSP Airport. On the day we visited Ellis, the crew had already de-iced 25, even though it was above freezing.
“There’s still some frost and residual snowflakes flying out there,” he said.
The crews here are so good at it that they train and help out at other airports.
“We’ve been doing it for decades, and over time we’ve perfected the process,” Ellis said. “Our trainers, I mean, they’ve got this down cold — no pun intended.”
So, the next time you look out from your window seat, look for Ellis and his team.
“Knowing that everybody on that plane is gonna be safe, you know, get where they’re going. And you get to drive around pretty cool machines,” he said. “That’s a pretty big perk.”
On a frosty day, Delta crews use about 2,000 gallons of propylene glycol. The airport runs a program to collect the chemicals and recycle them into things like anti-freeze.
Source: CBS Minnesota
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