Winter operations Just warming up
If they’re above or below a certain latitude, airports have always had to face freezing winter storms and all the challenges they bring. Naturally, solutions from de-icing chemicals to snow ploughs have been around for decades. But each comes with its own set of problems, something also true of many heated pavement systems. Yet with the development of an elegant new approach, might these problems be consigned to the past? Andrea Valentino learns more from Dr Matthew Brynick at the FAA William J Hughes Technical Center and Halil Ceylan, a professor at Iowa State University.
F
or six months a year, the US Midwest is an infamously snowbound place. From Michigan to the Dakotas, thousands of communities revel in the chill. In the small Wisconsin town of Lake Geneva, to give but one example, residents host the National Snow Sculpting Championship, a 72-hour competition where beer-swilling Berninis sculpt pixies and dragons from blocks of ice. Local governments get active too. Minnesota’s government owns 800 snowploughs, undoubtedly wise for a state where it snows an average of 43in a year. It’s little wonder Wisconsinites jokingly dismiss their western neighbours as ‘Minne-snow-tans’.
Yet it’s arguably nearby Iowa that faces the fiercest winters of all. This is the place, after all, where the word ‘blizzard’ was first coined, by shivering German settlers adapting their word for ‘lightning’ in the mid-19th century. And though their gnarled wooden cabins have long since vanished, modern Iowans still struggle with the snow – not least in their airports. Representative is a storm in January 2021, where 12.9in fell on Des Moines International Airport over a two-day period. Flight cancellations inevitably followed, something that happens almost every year. Of course, the upper Midwest is far from alone. Every year, winter weather forces the cancellation
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FAA
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