NASA and the Aircraft Icing Gap

At a conference in June 1955, Uwe H. von Glahn, the NASA branch chief in charge of icing research at the then-Lewis Research Center (now Glenn Research Center) in Cleveland boldly told fellow scientific investigators: "Aircraft are now capable of flying in icing clouds without difficulty. . . because research by the NACA and others has provided the engineering basis for ice-protection systems.”[1214]

That sentiment, in combination with the growing interest and need to support a race to the Moon, effectively shut down icing research by

the NACA, although private industry continued to use Government facilities for their own cold-weather research and certification activi­ties, most notably the historic Icing Research Tunnel (IRT) that still is in use today at the Glenn Research Center (GRC). The Government’s return to icing research began in 1972 at a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers in Dallas, during which an aeronautics-related panel was set up to investigate ice accretion prediction methods and define where improvements in related technologies could be made. Six years later the panel concluded that little progress in understanding icing had been accomplished since the NACA days. Yet since the for­mation of NASA in 1958, 20 years earlier, aircraft technology had fun­damentally changed. Commercial aviation was flying larger jet airliners and being asked to develop more fuel-efficient engines, and at the same time the U. S. Army was having icing issues operating helicopters in icy conditions in Europe. The Army’s needs led to a meeting with NASA and the FAA, followed by a July 1978 conference with 113 represen­tatives from industry, the military, the U. S. Government, and several nations. From that conference sparked the impetus for NASA restart­ing its icing research to "update the applied technology to the current state of the art; develop and validate advanced analysis methods, test facilities, and icing protection concepts; develop improved and larger testing facilities; assist in the difficult process of standardization and regulatory functions; provide a focus to the presently disjointed efforts within U. S. organizations and foreign countries; and assist in dissem­inating the research results through normal NASA distribution chan­nels and conferences.”[1215]

While icing research programs were considered, proposed, planned, and in some cases started, full support from Congress and other stake­holders for the return of a major, sustained icing research effort by NASA did not come until after an Air Florida Boeing 737 took off from National Airport in Washington, DC, in a snowstorm and within seconds crashed on the 14th Street Bridge. The 1982 incident killed 5 people on the bridge, as well as 70 passengers and 4 crewmembers. Only five peo­ple survived the crash, which the National Transportation Safety Board blamed on a number of factors, assigning issues related to icing as a major cause of the preventable accident. Those issues included faulting

the flight crew for not activating the twin engine’s anti-ice system while the aircraft was on the ground and during takeoff, for taking off with snow and ice still on the airfoil surfaces of the Boeing aircraft, and for the lengthy delay between the final time the aircraft was de-iced on the tarmac and the time it took the crew to be in position to receive takeoff clearance from the control tower and get airborne. While all this was happening the aircraft was exposed to constant precipitation that at var­ious times could be described as rain or sleet or snow.[1216]

The immediate aftermath of the accident—including the dramatic rescue of the five survivors who had to be fished out of the Potomac River—was all played out on live television, freezing the issue of air­craft icing into the national consciousness. Proponents of NASA renew­ing its icing research efforts suddenly had shocking and vivid proof that additional research for safety purposes was necessary in order to deal with icing issues in the future. Approval for a badly needed major ren­ovation of the IRT at GRC was quickly given, and a new, modern era of NASA aircraft icing investigations began.[1217]