crab,
The removed sections dealt with your introduction of politics to this thread, and they were (rightly) removed by Senior Pilot as being a bit too rough.
The simple fact is that in many of hours of snow and icing flight, and in the qualification of several helos in snow (the reason why I entered this thread, having experienced at least one engine failure in a prototype due to snow ingestion), I have never seen Ice where there is snow. And BTW, sleet is not snow, unless you decided to change the definition. The boundary between the two forms of precip is usually a temperature change, in my experience, where the temp goes close to zero C and sleet/freezing rain are present. Once moisture makes snow, it does not make ice. The change from sleet to snow can take place in as little as 5 miles of airspace, but I repeat, where there is snow, there is not ice.
Supercooled ice comes in Bourbon, btw.
acer, I certainly agree with you. "Known" would seem to allow one to fly in clouds where no reports of ice exist, but that is a sucker hole. In terms of flight planning, cold clouds mean the reasonable probability of "knowing" there will be ice, period. The cure is simple. Get a helo with blade anti-ice!
However, flight in snow virtually never results in icing, unless the temperature is nearer freezing where you can cross the line between snow and sleet/freezing rain.