Originally Posted by
captplaystation
Any swept wing jet transport with no leading edge devices is very subsceptible to icing.
I had previously flown the DC9-15, but we weren't that paranoid . . . maybe we were just lucky.
He told me straight 100% you MUST be sure you have no ice/frost you MUST do a tactile inspection of the wing before being sure, I believed him, the guys in Pau didn't do the TR with him I guess.
You are bang on. By far the biggest danger is for unslatted-swept wing jets. If you look at the long list of jets that have crashed due to wing contamination issues on takeoff, only one had slats...the Air Florida 737. And as someone already mentioned, there was a significant lack of power application in that incident.
Several DC-9's have crashed but only the early versions with no slats. Several CRJ's have crashed but only the 200 version with no slats(and unslatted Challengers with their similar wings).
This phenomenon was specifically mentioned by the NTSB in the La Guardia F-28 accident.
Never fly with frozen contamination on these type of aircraft(unfrozen such as bugs would be of concern as well I suppose). And I would suggest de/anti-icing as a precaution as the temperature approaches freezing if there is moisture on the wing.
Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
Yes, I was taking total surface area literally, but I accept your point that if you're talking about stuff falling from the sky, then it's only upper surfaces that are relevant.
Falling precipitation can contaminate the leading edges under certain circumstances. We were parked into wind once and ended up having to de-ice the front of all the prop blades once(16 blades) when we got wet snow falling(mostly horizontally) in a 30 knot wind as the temperature was decreasing leading to a bunch of ice on the blades and the wing leading edge. I remember that they didn't need to de-ice the top of the wing.