Originally Posted by
Lonewolf_50
That's chilling. How does one address tail icing in the 737? Is there a particular procedure or set of airspeed limits, pitch limits, etc? (Is there an ice detection circuit that alerts the pilot to tail ice being detected?)
Configuration differences; do they require separate sim checks/quals? Seems a place for a few holes to appear in the cheese.
None of the Boeing aircraft have tail anti-icing. Boeing designs the tail to be large enough to be immune from icing. It's never been a problem, but then how many times has an aircraft actually held for 2 hours in icing conditions?
http://aviation.stackexchange.com/qu...ail-anti-icing
"Some airplanes don't need the horizontal stabilizer to have anti-ice because it was shown during flight testing that there were no adverse effects from having ice on the tail.
This is mainly because the horizontal stabilizer/elevator has been designed so that even with a degradation of lift due to the ice, it still produces a sufficient tail down force to maintain control, even when approaching the stall speed.
The airplanes that do have anti-ice usually either have smaller horizontal stabilizers or (on some older designs) couldn't get the FAA to sign off on a design without it. Some designs are also more prone to collecting ice (based mainly on the radius of the leading edge) so must demonstrate sufficient handling qualities with even more ice, which may not be possible."