cold weather gear.

[Fun Police]

since our canadian forums has augered i would like to pose this question here. kiwis, aussies, south africans, and others from pleasant climes are welcome to read with interest but please refrain from any joking ;).
what i am looking for is a good pair of gloves that maintain some dexterity but will keep your fingers warm until the heater in the machine has caught up. winter ops in canada can get pretty extreme, especially when the machine sits outside at night at <-40C. even with a heater in the cabin (and of coarse the appropriate covers over the fuselage & blades, oh and heaters on engine MGB, etc) the cyclic and collective become very cold and after two fairly unpleasant bouts with frostbite on my fingers i am susceptible to cold.
any advice would be greatly appreciated and if anyone would be interested in my glove collection it will be available on ebay.

[John Eacott]

FP,

Have you tried snowboarder's gloves? There are some fairly good, insulated & flexible bits of kit out there, since many of the feral snowboarders want them for rail & trick riding.

Whilst we get snow here, frostbite isn't one of our most pressing problems ;)

[SASless]

Scrap the gloves dear friend....get the bossfellah to erect a nice warm hangar.....put the aircraft on a dolly....slide the doors open...roll out the wagon....and off you go.....

We rigged up a system so that we could control the boat winch by remote control....land on the dolly...hit the hangar door remote....when the doors opened to the stops....hit the winch remote....and like magic into the hangar you go.

By the time you disconnect all the heaters, remove all the covers...crank and warm up the oils....your response time will be much quicker....and warmer for the crew.

[Fun Police]

JE, thanks for the suggestion. i'll go look tomorrow to see what i can find (from the cutest snowboard chick i can find, of coarse!).
SASless. i wish i could convince the hefe to build a hangar at every camp or staging that we have but i don't think that his pockets are that deep. the vast majority of our work is off base in the bush and so its not really very practical. i'd have better luck convincing the manufacturers to put heat tape in the cyclic and collective grips. after all, if bombardier can put that on a $10000 (cdn) skidoo, then i'm sure someone could find a way to put it on a $1.5KK helicopter. although, i do think your suggestion is better all around.

[bellsux]

I found that using nomex gloves underneath a pair of polartec or wool gloves that have had their fingertips removed works really well as it keeps your hands warm and lets you operate switches, latches etc. Most of the other pilots and engineers that I worked with in antarctica used this method as well.

[farsouth]

I have had similar problems - Have been flying Twin Otters and Dash 7 in Antarctica for the past 10 southern summers, and have never really found a pair of gloves that work. Definitely, the more often you get cold injuries the worse things get - it is cumulative over the years.....

Only suggestion I can offer is that prevention is better than cure - once your hands get cold, no glove in the world will warm them up, and mitts are the only type of glove that will work then (I know that is no use for delicate work, switches, controls etc).

Gloves cannot warm your hands, all they can do is keep bodily warmth in there. I think that what happens is the blood thickens as it gets cold, then blocks the smallest vessels, no more heat gets to that area, and no glove will cure that.

However.... one thing that I found did work is to try and keep my arms warm - I never used to worry too much about that as they didn't feel cold, but now I figure that if you can keep the blood warm as it goes down your arm, it has a better chance of keeping the fingers warm at the end

Hope that is of some use

(By the way, I do some proper flying as well, in the northern summer, North Sea AS332L's......)

[Hughes500]

Try some electricaly heated gloves - motorcycle shops have them. if you have a cig lighter connect in via a 24 v to 12 v dropper. If no cig lighter get engineers to rig up power connection. Most ac have a power receptacle somewhere !

[oldbeefer]

Winter exercises in Norway : -25C was not unusual. Used to use silk inners with cape leather gloves over. Worked for me!

[Vert Ref]

Try a pair of RAF issue leather flying gloves with some mountaineering 'soft shell' gloves over the top. Most good mountaineering clothing companies makes gloves designed for climbing and using ice tools in. They should be warm enough provided you've got good insulation on your arms and your trunk isn't getting too cold. I've used this down to -35(not aviating!) with a a pair of gore-tex fleece lined mitts over the top to keep the whole lot dry and my hand warm while i'm outside.

Grip and dextrity should be good enough, and as you warm up you can go down to just the leather gloves underneath.

Something like:

http://www.snowandrock.com/shop/activity/alpine_expedition/clothing/gloves/products/MFIHZ.htm

[Genghis the Engineer]

Whilst not a rotary pilot, I do a lot of open cockpit flying in the British winter, which is a pretty hostile environment on yer mitts.

The best I've yet found is a pair of gloves that were designed for moped riders - basically they are very well insulated but (unlike motorcyle gloves) have no ballistic padding - I can just operate small switches and buttons whilst wearing these. In very cold weather I supplement them with some silk inner gloves, again readily obtained from a bike shop. This combination will give me about an 45 minutes of useful use of my hands in temperatures down to about 5°C below freezing with (as a rough guess) 45 knots of wind onto my body, including my hands - with windchill that's probably not all that different to Canadian winter without wind, i.e. inside a cabin. (Mind you, anything to avoid touching metal controls - squash racket tape, rubber tubing, whatever will add another half an hour on top of that).

For the really hardened winter flyers, there is only one thing better - that is electrically heated clothing - I use a heated jerkin but not gloves. There are a few companies out there, but you could try looking at http://www.widder.com/html/Product/LectricG/index.htm for a starter.

G

[heedm]

45 kts at -5C gives a Wind Corrected Temperature of -17C (WCT is what the conditions feel like in a calm to zero wind).

Yesterday the high was -22C. Two days ago the high was below -30C and the wind was strong.

As in the original post, those who are "...from pleasant climes are welcome to read with interest but please refrain from any joking ;) "

It really is hard to imagine how cold it can get and yet with the right equipment you can still function fairly normally.

Layers definitely is the answer. Something non-synthetic close to the skin, nomex flying gloves above that and then big warm mitts on top...no dexterity so it stops you from flying until you've warmed up the pit enough to function.

Matthew.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Well, if I'm getting about 45 minutes of use out of my fingers at -17°C equivalent, how long does your cabin heater take to work?

And if anybody thinks that flying for an hour in an open cockpit in a British winter constitutes "warm and pleasant climes", please drop by and I'd be happy to demonstrate.

Seriously I agree about layers - but don't discount heated clothing, it's a wonderful thing.

G

[Shawn Coyle]

Silk glove liners (used to be available from Lands End) work extremely well inside any type of gloves or mitts. The thickness is imperceptible and they seem to wear pretty well. The Canadian Air Force used to have flying gloves with winter liners (slightly thicker than the summer liners) but I'm not sure if you can find those anywhere in a reasonable condition.
Silk socks (no, not stockings) also work very well for keeping the tootsies warm. Again, no perceivable thickness issues and they did wear pretty well.

[MD900 Explorer]

Fun Police

I have found that if you take a trip to any motorbike shop and get some inners for the racing gloves, they are kinda windproof, and thin, coupled with a pair of fleece gloves from The North face (http://www.northface.com) with Gore Windstopper in them, you will be very toasty, even on your way to the aircraft when the chill factor is down to -20.

I find that after a little activity, the rush of the blood goes about the body and starts heating up the extremities and you will soon want to take them off.

Gloves from The North face - 35 GBP
Inners from Motorbike shop - ca. 15-25 GBP

= Toasty hands that are able to work. :ok:

MD:)

[heedm]

Genghis, -17C wind corrected temperature is uncomfortably cold but is not even considered to carry a risk of frostbite after prolonged exposure. -40C with calm winds (ie inside a cockpit) can cause frostbite to exposed skin in less than 10 minutes. -30C with a 20 knot wind gives a wind corrected temperature of -47C. The time it takes to untie the blades and stow the straps can cause serious frost bite to exposed skin. Check out pictures of frostbite on the internet if you don't know what it looks like...not nice, very painful.

I don't want to imply that the conditions you mention are "pleasant" but surely you can see it is a completely different environment than what the original question concerned.

What you say about electrically heated items is definitely worth considering. Haven't used them myself, but it seems to make sense.

[IHL]

If flying a basic VFR helicopter with a only a magnetic compass for heading reference you may want to check and see if the electriclly heated gloves affect the compass.

I know in my old JR-III days, steel toe boots used to deflect the compass by about 10 degrees.

[Gregg]

I have had some success with a pair of US Navy winter flying gloves. I wore them in -30C weather with no problems, including mornings after the aicraft had cold-soaked outdoors. However, my helicopter had a very effective cockpit heater, so I only had to deal with the real cold for a short period of time. I wore mittens over top to keep the hands fully warm prior to getting in the cockpit.