Originally Posted by
Dct_Mopas
At most major European airports the de-ice process is seamless. You taxi out and near the runway holding point normally 2 de-ice rigs are waiting to de-ice whilst you keep engines running. Maximises hold over times with you then ready for an immediate departure. Wouldn’t be too much effort by MAN to sort something similar, even Madrid has this process and it’s rarely used. Just such a waste of time/resource when the de-ice rigs have to drive around the airport from aircraft to aircraft, with the rig operator mountain/dismounting the boom box.
In principle a reasonable idea, however once you start to look at Manchester’s geography it suddenly gets a lot harder. Stands 80/231, aka taxiway Papa is the obvious place, but no good once you start thinking of a load of Ryanair’s and Flybe’s trying to get round there from T3 in the morning departure rush. Nowhere south of 23R/05L is any good when 23L isn’t the departure runway (traffic would be going back and forth across 23R/05L to de-ice). Anywhere else would cause chaos as there would be nowhere to go round the de-icing aircraft - you’d quickly get a backlog of departures as at best your frequency of takeoffs could be no better than how quickly each aircraft can be de-iced. Others will know better than I, but I’d be surprised if an aircraft can be de-iced in less than 5 minutes even with 2 rigs.
One thing that could help will be once the new T2 is fully operational and T1 is pulled down. That could give some centrally located space to use.