I cannot refrain from intervening because it can be deadly for your seeds to sprout.
"Quousque tandem abutere, AirRabbit, patientia nostra?"
You know me and the pulpit my words come from.
Can I say the same of you?
I don’t think you’ve ever been (sitting at the front row of a plane and not in front of a 6-Drawer Oak desk) in such a situation:
Typical winter night in Europe, about to leave from an airport during a dreadful snowstorm.
In addition to the usual procedures we had to:
- Take a place in the queue for the de-icing
- Wait every few tens of minutes for the runway in use and taxiways to be cleared from snow.
- Based on the estimated time of completion of the aforementioned procedures, request a slot for departure.
- Calculating the synchronization of all of that to determine if and when to surrender to the pressure of ramp agent who wanted the passengers to be embarked.
I had long since given up the scheduled departure time.
It's obvious that it was wishful thinking to have all the above operations completed all together.
If the runway had been cleared, the plane was not yet being deiced / anti-iced, or vice versa, or the slot provided had expired and reassigned half an hour later, and then we had to go back to the starting point.
If the passengers had boarded, we had to invite them to remain on board for not losing the priority acquired; maybe we prayed the flight attendants to serve a refreshment.
Finally everything was ready to start (there was a tyrannical "holdover time"), but not without having alerted the Purser not to hesitate to advise if he saw some snow on the wings.
And then:
There were conditional procedures to apply: special operations, "Cold Weather Operations" and "T.O. and Landing on Contaminated Rwys ".
They had to be performed, with the contribution of PF and PNF; a flight controls test at the beginning and at the end of taxi, a test of extension and retraction of the flaps / slats, the activation of Engine Anti-ice (with engine run-up every ten minutes to remove any ice formed on the intake of the engines and on PT2 probes), and the predisposition of the Airfoil anti-ice, after start.
After rotation we were expected to cycle the “retraction / extension / retraction” of the landing gear in order to shake any slush from it.
It's absolutely clear that avoiding all of this fuss would make life much more easy, and I confess that more than once I found myself in the embarrassing
position to explain to a passenger of mine stating: "That guy did not perform the deicing and is going, while we are having such a delay ... "
My answer: "Safety is our first goal."
CONTAMINATION ON ANY PART OF THE AIPLANE: NO GO!