Taking Off On Glare Ice With A Crosswind. Illustration by Gabriel Campanario
The storied town of Greenville, Maine, lies at the bottom end of the northern part of the state in an area called the Great North Woods. It curls around the foot of a 40-mile-long Moosehead Lake and is a good three-hour drive due north from Portland, Maine – three hours if you don’t encounter a deer or a moose along the way. Maine averages around 10 such collisions every day.
Greenville isn’t just a long drive north; it’s a journey back in time. Except for a few flashy individuals who have built showy summer homes on the lake, you feel as though you’ve stepped back to the 1950s. It’s a pleasant feeling, and thousands of people flock there in the summer to share that experience.
Not as many venture up there in the winter because it’s cold and snowy. Snowy is an inadequate word to describe Greenville in winter. The snow up there is like the snow anywhere else in Maine in winter, only deeper.
This was my impression as I landed on a moonless night in January at the Greenville airport. The temperature was around 15°Fahrenheit, not bad for Greenville, but the snowbanks on either side of the runway, as far as I could see with my Tri-Pacer’s landing lights, were at least a couple feet higher than my wings. And the bottom of my wings is more than 5 feet above the ground. The runway lights were on, but many were buried in the snow. It was around 8 p.m., and the airport, like most small fields after dark, was deserted.
I didn’t have a specific mission in Greenville. I was simply “out flying around at night.” I do that from time to time. Since my 1957 Tri-Pacer (160 HP) is parked at an unlit field all summer, my opportunities for night flying, other than my commute to Boston, are mainly in winter. I move the plane from our unlit grass strip in Phillips, Maine, to Norridgewock, Maine, for the winter, about 45 miles to my east.
There, I rent an open hangar on a field that was built as an emergency landing spot for bombers during World War II. Today, it’s Central Maine Regional Airport, featuring two runways, one lighted, a rotating beacon, a snowplow truck, and a heated and unlocked small terminal building.
The flight from Norridgewock to Greenville took around 40 minutes, flying at 3,500 feet above a half-dozen 2,000-foot mountains and beneath a star-studded night sky. Except for the occasional cabin, this terrain is uninhabited logging country dotted with small mountain lakes. There are long stretches with no lights visible from the ground.
As I approached Greenville, I noticed the wind from the north was beginning to weaken and shift around to the west. By the time I taxied to a quiet corner – all the corners of the field were completely silent – scudding clouds had started to cover some of the stars. In the few minutes I sat there, resting and reading the map with a flashlight, the wind had completely shifted to the south and picked up, in gusty bursts. Something else also caught my attention.
When I left Norridgewock that night, I had taken off on good snowpack. We in Maine love snowpack. I don’t know what its coefficient of friction is – it obviously varies with the temperature – but snowpack offers decent traction. You can land, take off and taxi on snowpack without excessive caution. Ice (glare ice), on the other hand, is a completely different beast. Nothing and no one can handle glare ice – that is, unless your airplane is flying straight and smoothly and no other forces, like a crosswind, are pushing you off a true course. A single puff of crosswind air, and Newton’s Law heads for the nearest snowbank.
The runway at Greenville that night looked odd. I now gave it a closer inspection. “Damn, this is glare ice. It must have rained or thawed here recently,” I thought. I turned around and taxied for takeoff in the opposite direction I had landed. The crosswind was now roughly 90 degrees across the runway. I could tell this by the blowing snow. It was time to go before it got worse. I advanced the throttle and headed down the tunnel between the snowbanks.
Immediately, the crosswind began pushing me to the left snowbank. I applied some right rudder and weathervaned about 10 degrees. I also tilted the ailerons that way, but I was still too slow for them to take effect. Soon I was 15 degrees to the right, maybe even more, literally gliding slightly sideways down a dark runway. For a long moment, I thought, “Hmm, this is working quite well.” Then I saw something that changed my thinking. The lights on the Tri-Pacer are mounted on the left wing, so I could see at least a few yards down the runway. And there, approaching rapidly now, very rapidly, was a big flaw in this sideways-on-ice idea: a bare patch 10 or 15 yards wide across the runway. There was no time to think about what would happen if I hit that nice asphalt in a full-power sideways skid.
Left rudder, center the nose on the runway, ailerons full hard to the right, full flaps – in a Tri-Pacer, you can pull the flaps down with a Johnson bar in a second – time to get off the ground early, the right wing now coming down nicely, holding me steady, and “pop,” we are up and into the pure blackness of the North Woods.
As a non-instrument-rated pilot, I have rarely been so happy to keep my eyes glued to the gauges and make a 30-degree climbing turn back over the airport. There’s no room for error in the dark out here. Greenville has mountains to the north, east and south. I got the snow-dimmed runway lights back in sight and spiraled back up to unoccupied air.
Whenever you fly on contaminated surfaces, there is a possibility that braking and/or directional control could be compromised. But if you want to fly in the wintertime in any northern state, you have to accept at least some of that risk. For me, the rule is, no crosswind takeoffs on glare ice unless the wind is directly down the middle over the home plate. You might be able to get away with sliding on glare ice if you are on a large chunk of frozen lake, preferably one that isn’t cluttered with ice-fishing shacks full of happy campers. But snow-free ice on lakes is rarely smooth everywhere. It’s best to have an approach directly into the wind, or just wait it out in place. Always have an escape route, and if you don’t, wait to fly until you do.
From Chuck Boyer’s book,Remove After Flight, Amazon Books.
