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Old 5th Jan 2004, 23:23
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Seloco
 
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: NE Surrey, UK
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Electric Sky:

There was certainly an instance of a SAS MD80 series coming down in Sweden about 12 years ago after ingesting snow into its engines on take off; there were some fatalities in spite of a very professional forced landing by the crew.

The sad thing about this incident was that it happened only a couple of years after an almost identical situation with a Paramount Airlines MD83 charter from Gatwick to Nice during an unseasonal March blizzard. On this occasion the snow/slush ingestion damaged the engines but still allowed the aircraft to remain airborne - but only just! After a very fraught 40 minutes or so the aircraft made a successful (second) landing attempt at Filton, chosen because of the length of the runway and availability of emergency services, which were thankfully not required. Again it was a masterful recovery by the crew of a very dangerous situation - caused by the build-up of snow/slush on the wings coming off at rotation and going straight back into the engines. I believe that allowable times between de-icing (to which the Paramount aircraft had been subjected) and take off have since been reduced significantly to prevent such an occurence happening again.
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