Originally Posted by
Johnny F@rt Pants
It actually had nothing to do with the airport, the equipment or the handling agents, it was all down to the amount of time that it took to de-ice the aeroplanes.
Normally it takes 5-10 minutes, but yesterday morning it took almost 40 minutes to clear the ice off my 737-800, all due to the severity of the ice. This was not your regular frost, this was rain from the previous evening that had frozen solid and was stuck like sh1t to a blanket. Each aeroplane took considerably longer than normal, hence the delays building.
Oh, and by the way it does happen at other airports across Europe too, they just don't bleat like the British. A friend of mine waited 2 hours a couple of days ago in Zurich for de-icing, and that is certainly somewhere that gets more snow and ice than we do.
That is not the airports or handling agents fault, it is the airlines! With accurate weather forecasts and the know fact that snow/freezing weather was coming, you anti-ice. That way when you come to de-ice it still only takes 5-10 minutes. No doubt it is the bean counters saving a few quid by not allowing anti-icing to be done, and then end up paying 4x as much because you can't get the stuff off the next day, or just poor planning.
A few years ago, unless you had anti-iced the night before you would go to the back of the queue for de-icing as you held everybody else up and caused shortages of fluid.