Javok

Nothing a little wing heat on-the-fly can't fix. /sarcasm

The Dominican

Airlines back in the day did this regularly (depending of course on the OAT) is there any information on where was this recorded? And what was the OAT? Neither of us knows the SOP's of this particular company but looking at this pragmatically, I am more inclined to think that their operation specifications allows this at the temperature ranges of -40 or bellow as it gets in a lot of areas of their country, and not so much into thinking that two trained pilots from an international carrier have a death wish. Not defending this practice mind you, just pointing out that if this is fresh fallen snow over a very cold surface, there is no possibility that it will stick to the wing. Think about it, in the era of YouTube and smart phones, would a pilot blatantly violate their SOP's? I'm not too sure.

cactusmike

Talking to some of our guys with really cold WX experience says that this may be normal SOP in extreme cold. If you check the wing during preflight and there is nothing sticking, I.e., you can blow off the snow then this would be perfectly acceptable.

Someone with experience in the Arctic or northern Canada or Europe should have a good handle on this.

Singlecoil

We can elect to not deice if the snow is dry and the ambient is below -15C. Approved by the FAA. To me, it didn't look like those conditions were met in the video, but I don't work for Aeroflot.

KoruPilot

In high and cold conditions the snow is often too dry to adhere to the wing. 'Adhere' being the operative term when talking about the clean wing concept. In a place like Calgary, in the middle of winter, heavy snow will accumulate on a dry wing and blow off, but you'd better be sure about it, and the wing had better be clean before taxi (any snow removed through means including brushed).

That doesn't appear to be the case here and they have a heap of snow adhering to the wing and wing surfaces at rotation; nasty. In fact it looks like they had fuelled the aircraft as there was a patch of clear about centre wing. Fuel is often about 10 deg C and will melt frost generally, but is really OK only above freezing, and only in humid conditions where the wing was clean on the way in and there was no precip.

My two cents from my years in Canada. . . never seen anything like that before though.

PW305

judging by the speed which it started to shed I wouldn't exactly call it light, dry powder.

nerd2009

I believe that Russia recently lost an ATR72 due to this practice.

YGBFKM !

mike734

Yet it still mostly blew off. What does that tell you about the rules/procedures? It tells you there are huge safety margins.

PW305

I don't fly an Airbus so doesn't tell me much, really. Some wings are not as forgiving.

mynameisjim

There are safety margins, but choosing to use the safety margins to skip deicing may not leave you any margin left to accept an engine failure or other difficulty.