24-11-2008, 12:00 PM
Quote:KenG wrote:
IMHO icing is a very visual thing in the real world. You look out and see ice building up on the airplane, it is confirmed with subtle increase
in power and you de-ice the airplane at an appropriate point. Or, you have knowledge of ice ahead and out activate you anti-icing
equipment. Without some sort of visual clue; ice building up on surfaces, corners of the windscreen, ect it would be a guessing game in
FSX. There must also be mentioned that in the real world there is multiple types of de-ice and anti-ice equipment each with different
activation criteria. Even on the same airplane (B190) I have rubber deice boots on the wings and tail, heated engine inlets (controllable in
the cockpit), ice separation vanes, heated propellers, and an electro-thermally heated and air defrosted windshields. It might sound safe
to just turn everything on all the time, but that puts additional stress on the systems or in the case of the inlet heat increases the
temperature of the air entering the engine decreasing engine performance or the vanes reduce the volume of air entering the engine also
reducing engine performance.
You must also consider that generally you only build up ice in visible moisture. (I am not going to discuss clear air icing.) That is very
dependent on the settings that someone has in FSX.
As for on the ground, de-icing is nothing more than sitting as you get blasted then starting your stopwatch based on type I or type II of fluid,
dilution, temperature and weather conditions. There are also type III and type IV fluids but I haven't used those fluids. We have a card in
the cockpit we look at the application and the conditions and it gives us the correct holdover times. Other than shutting off bleed air there
is really nothing special to being deiced.
I really wouldn't call icing rare, in fact it occurs with regularity. Most large transport planes blast through it quickly and don't think much
about it. For turboprops we often find ourselves in icing conditions due to we generally operate right around the freezing level.
In fact I have had to remove ice while in arrival holding, waiting to land at HECA (Cairo, Egypt). If I can pick up ice over the Sierra Desert
then I don't think it is such a rare event globally.
I never understood if on FSX icing is simulated or not anyway...
Maybe on the Flight 1 ATR72-300 icing and deicing really affect the flight.
There is also an "icing" option among FSX settings but I never encountered any difference changing it...
It would be nice if FSX could "fill this gap"...
Nick
Post Edited ( 11-24-08 12:00 )