THE ICE BOGEY

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 104, 19 May 1937, Page 7

THE ICE BOGEY

(Own Oorrpspondent-

Cause of # Many Air Accidents C0NTR0L EXPERIMENTS

— By Air Mail)

LONDON, April 24. Ice, bogey of air pilots, is big news again. Within the last month air erash has followed air crash with.terrible rapidity. When the cause of a crash has remained a mystery — ice is the invariable unofficial verdict. Snow 'and ice were mentioned in the reports on the £40,000 Imperial Airways flying-boat Capricornus, which crashed with the loss of five lives on her maiden voyage to the East. News flashed across the Atlantic of 13 killed in a United States air liner bound fpr Chicago. Ice was the cause. De-icing swept the aviation world fchree years ago, leaying experts sharply divided into two camps. Now there i$ a tendency, except in midsummer, to blame jce for almost every accident for which the cause is not at once apparent. De-icers fall into two classes — mechanical and chemical. The best-known mechanieal device consists of rubber tubes along the leading edges. An air motor sends air pulsing round the system, makihg the tubes swell and contract, breaking thin ic© which may be forming on the edges. Chemical methods keep the leading edges soaked with a compound on which ice will not readily form or stick. Critics say that ice dangers are rare and exaggerated and1 that the best mechanieal de-ieers are heavy enough to cause appreeiable loss of pay-load, apart from cost. They say that the devices could not deal with ice formation which was bad enough to affect a 'plane seriously, either by weight of the ice or by altering the shape of the wings. British experts ate not satisfied that the right device is yet available. On the other hand, there is an agitation for the use of existing devices, which may be of some use, pending the invention of something better. Thousands of pilots have flown for years in all sorts of weather without being troubled by ice. Recently I was flown from two mile high to more than four miles high in a Hawker Hart with struts, wires and leading edges thickly encrusted with ice. Admittedly jt is funny stuff. Sometimes you go higher to get rid of it 1 I believe that better weather and wireless sernce, and more aerocfromes and sheets of jvater which can be reached by blind landing systems, offer the more hopeful solution.