Originally Posted by
smujsmith
AA62,
How about anyone who has memories of incidents where the aircraft showed its ability to withstand adversity. I have in my mind a story from way back of Albert arriving in Gander with a couple of tons of ice on the nose, I believe due to heating failure. I'm sure I saw it in Air Clues, but I'm just guessing.
Smudge
Smuj,
You are quite right that was at Gander and the 'photo of Albert's nose covered in thick ice (taken a couple of hours post landing mind!) did appear in Air Clues.
It was another 30 Sqn crew - the Captain was Uncle Fester but I forget who the Co was. Apparently they realised something was wrong when the Co had all 4 throttles fire-walled to try and kill the rate of descent on the IMC approach. Indeed, all 4 engines were seriously over-torqued and the aircraft was
still descending!
I remember seeing the aftermath, there must have been tons of clear ice accreted on the airframe. I'm not sure they'd had a radome de-icing failure so much as that it had been overwhelmed by the sheer rapidity of the ice build up.
We'd landed some 15 or 20 minutes before off a back beam ILS to R/W 31 and had had warnings of possible icing from ATC but had picked up nothing more than a bit of hoar frost.
Scary stuff!