De-Icing Questions

[awralls]

Greetings,

OK, I admit it…I'm probably a bit odd. I use FSC only in FSX and fly airline timetables only from the 1950s. My sim world is mostly backdated; urban areas are reduced to their 1950s extent, airports are backdated and in some cases modern airports are completly removed and their earlier incarnations built from scratch. It all works rather nicely.

As one of fhe airlines I fly for is Northwest Orient, icing features fairly prominently. In the 1950s, modern de-icing fluids had not been invented. Deicing was exclusively done by hand and the only fluid available was diluted glycol applied after the scraping to remove the largest chunks was completed.

So, the question is..

How to reflect this in the deice.cfg? Currently, I have just an 'M' for smaller regional airports such as KMSN and KGEG and larger city airports such as KMSP and KMDW have just an 'A'. Do I need to add any numeric for the glycol deicing or does the 'A' take care of that?

Andy

[Travis]

Hi Andy,

What you describe is not any odder / different that what the rest of us do!  I admire your dedication.

From time to time I pretend I'm flying one of our regional Professional Sportsball Teams to their next game here in North America.  I'll find the flight details on Flight Aware and copy the expected Departure Time, the Routing, and any gate assignments to make the same flight as was actually flown.  How odd is that??

Your "M" and "A" airport modifications looks to work just fine.  "A" should be ethylene glycol no matter the era.  I'll run some tests in my next few weeks to double check though, and I've even some ideas for coding to prevent Type I - IV fluids to be available before their general availability in the 80s / 90s.
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Do your bespoke airports have guards to eliminate modern ILS abilities?  IIRC, in the 50s there were localizers all around, but much less glideslopes and DMEs.

Best,

[awralls]

Yeah, I use a brilliant resource, John Hewson's Flickr archive of classic airport photos and charts. Around 700 airports covered worldwide. This is what used to be the airport at Grand Forks, ND:

www.flickr.com/photos/12530375@N08/albums/72157664320577942

This airport is no longer there, replaced by the modern KGFK in the 1960s. The charts show what navaids existed and only those are created with the new airport. The modern KGFK is completely removed and the old one given the identifier KGF1 to ensure there's no conflict. In this case, the old airport is miles away from the modern site. If backdating an extant airport, KMSP for example, only the navaids present are put in. You're quite right about the prevalence of localisers over full ILSs. I've created or backdated every airport used by Northwest in the '50s (that hasn't already been done by someone else). You learn quite quickly how to get good at NDB let-downs and procedural turns. It's the only way they had and the accident level shows how dangerous it was.

Thanks for the confirmation of the de-icing plan.