New York – As driving sleet beat down on John F. Kennedy International Airport during a miserable late-winter storm last week, a cluster of pilots waited late into the night to see if ground crews could make their ice- covered jets safe enough to fly.
For many, it was a losing battle. In five hours, one terminal exhausted its 30,000-gallon supply of the chemical sprayed on airplane wings to protect them from ice and snow.
“That’s more than we normally use in half a winter,” said Edward Paquette, a manager at the company that operates the terminal.
Hundreds of passengers remained aboard the grounded jets for six, nine, even 14 hours as the de-icing operations ground to a halt. Furious travelers castigated the airlines for not letting them off planes.
Unknown to travelers, the fiasco may have been complicated by disagreement over whether the airlines should fly at all in such weather.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines have been at odds for two years about the protocols for taking off in storms that produce light ice pellets, a term for the stinging sleet that occurs when snow melts, then refreezes, as it falls from the sky.
The dispute began in October 2005 when the FAA temporarily barred flights in these ice storms after a Canadian study indicated that anti-icing fluids might not work in such conditions.
Air carriers protested, and the FAA in August began allowing flights again, but only if pilots can take off within 25 minutes of a de-icing procedure.
Planes that don’t beat that deadline have to be de-iced again, creating headaches for airlines because departing flights routinely exceed the 25- minute threshold at major airports. That means some planes that are deiced have to leave the takeoff queue and go back to be de-iced again.
Airlines argue that the FAA overreacted to an inconclusive study and is needlessly grounding planes that could fly safely.
FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette acknowledged that the decision to limit operations in light ice pellets was prompted by an abundance of caution, and the agency’s policy is still being developed.
