Dear Yahoo!:

Dear Yahoo!:
How is a plane de-iced?
Fearful Flyer


Dear Fearful:
Carefully, we hope.

Actually, the answer to your timely question includes a lesson in choosing your keywords wisely. A search on "plane de-ice" was not specific enough so we tried again, with the more focused "airplane de-ice."

Included in the new search results was a link to an article titled "Keeping ice off airplane wings," from the archives of Mechanical Engineering magazine. An accompanying photograph shows a team working on the wings of a grounded plane. The caption reads:

In conventional deicing, crews use heated glycol-based fluids to remove existing ice, then coat the airplane with ice suppressants to prevent new ice from forming.

The article, which is a brief look at new technologies developed to detect ice on wings, also states that "[in-flight] ice is removed with engine heat or by inflating rubber bladders, called pneumatic boots, installed along the wings."

We returned to our search results hoping for more answers and found a report on Aircraft Icing provided by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). The "Deicing and Anti-Icing Equipment" section of the site included additional details about those little rubber bladders and boots, among other things.

In answering your question, we also learned a lesson in the relationship between keywords and spelling. Apparently there is no hyphen in "deice." So we searched on "airplane deice" and found a scattering of results that seem to corroborate our earlier findings.

http://ask.yahoo.com/20001221.html