Deicing Dissent
I just received the November 2008 issue of The Aviation Consumer and read the article on deicing. I have a TKS system on a Mooney 262 (a 231 modified firewall forward to 252 specs). From my experience, don’t trust estimates. The original installation cost was estimated at just over $25,000. By the time we were done, it was over $35,000. This kind of price escalation is nothing new to people with experience in aircraft maintenance and upgrades.
More important, I was disappointed in what the article failed to disclose about TKS. Your article clearly pointed out the critical deficiencies of Thermawing and
pneumatic boots, but failed to state the TKS is ice prevention and is not deice.
While most people and even the manufacturer talk about it as a deice system, it will not deice light rime ice nor will it deice clear ice once it has frozen into the pores.
I am speaking from actual experience rather than theory. And while TKS may deice clear ice in some situations, it will not deice many clear ice situations. TKS is better described as ice prevention. To be safe, you must turn it on before you get into ice. If you fail to turn it on before you see ice on the wing, you may not be able to get the ice off until you fly into warmer conditions.
This means that you waste a lot of fluid because you turn it on for icing conditions that do not really exist. It also means that if you are on a long flight and you pass through suspected ice on the climb and turn it on and forget to turn it off, you may not have fluid later when you need it for the descent. In addition, many FBOs don’t carry or may not have the fluid in stock.
There is a logical disconnect about flights into known icing and TKS on most aircraft that are not STCd for known ice. Since you need to turn it on before you get into ice and because your aircraft is not certified for flights into known ice, rather than turn it on, you should turn around. If you know the ice is there, you shouldnt be. If you do not know it is there, why would you turn it on? If you wait until you see the ice, it could be too late. It is this circuitous logical disconnect that will make me seriously consider the Thermawing technology for my next aircraft.
In addition, there’s another deice technology developed by Innovative Dynamics, Inc. (IDI) in Ithaca, New York. The technology was sold to Cox who, last I heard, was providing it to Cessna for use on one of their jets. It uses a set of