Icing
Types, temperature bands, severity, freezing level, and the escape plan.
16 min read · IFR weather
After this lesson you can
- Name the three types of structural ice and the conditions each one forms in.
- Explain why icing makes a stall more dangerous, not just more likely.
- Recognize tailplane stall symptoms and respond correctly, including what not to do.
- Estimate the freezing level, explain why it can occur twice, and know why freezing rain has no technical answer.
Structural icing is one of the few weather hazards that can turn a fully capable airplane into one that cannot maintain altitude, using nothing more than air that is already there: visible moisture and a surface at or below freezing. What makes it dangerous is not that it is rare -- flying in clouds during winter, it is common -- but that its effects are not linear. Twenty minutes of accumulation that felt manageable can be followed by a stall with none of the warnings the pilot was trained to expect.
This lesson covers the three types of structural ice and what each does to an airfoil, the specific danger of ice on the tailplane, everything on the airplane besides the wing that ice can compromise, and how to plan a flight around the freezing level -- including the one icing hazard, freezing rain, for which no light airplane has a technical answer.
The rest of this lesson
- 1.Three types of structural ice
- 2.What ice does to the airfoil
- 3.Tailplane icing and tailplane stall
- 4.Icing beyond the wing
- 5.The freezing level and why it can be doubled
- 6.Freezing rain: the one icing threat with no fix
- 7.Reporting and reacting
These 7 sections, their figures, the checks along the way and the end-of-lesson quiz come with the IFR track. Paid once, yours for good.
Key terms
Try to recall each definition before turning the card.