Skiing on the Planes in Snowy Countries
Flickr, Times&Spaces, Bush Operation on both sides of Arctic Add comments
Winter! It is so asserting in its cold reality. Something about this winter makes me think, a ‘hot topic of global warming’ should be adjusted a wee bit, uh.. at least, in terms of assessing its pace to be rather ‘moderate’, than ‘rapid’, as it falls upon us 
So far, the winter is surely reigning all over the North-Northern hemisphere.
‘Winter and snow’, I noticed, - were the two prevailing items catching my attention lately, whenever I would set off for another ‘virtual journey’ across a domain of aviation-related Internet. Moreover, on a ’solid real’ trip to Springbank that I took yesterday to see my friend Butch, I caught a sight of an artifact that seemed to be getting along very well with recently observed ‘bits and pieces’ which bringing about that ‘wintry mood’ in perception of things around
A Cessna-185E on ‘wheel skis’! The instant I spotted the plane, I couldn’t help but pull over, got off the car, and carefully walked around the Cessna for a better look at this smart contraption for ‘all-surface, all-season operation’.
A more close look at a manufacturer’s plate revealed the wheel-skis were made by ‘Genaire Limited‘.
And it was funny to see a cord running from some nearby source of electricity, to which the plane was apparently plugged in, - like any other car somewhere on an outside parking in this country! Oh, forgive me my ignorance, I’m still learning, gathering facts for our future ‘Comparative Analysis of Bush Operation on both sides of the Arctic Ocean’. I had no idea that it might be just another thing, an element of a common practice of taking care about planes during winter in Canada.
I’m pretty sure, they don’t do it in Siberia
March 1st, 2009 at 7:56 pm
The hydraulic power for the skis on a Cessna 185 is from a hand pump, it took quite a few cranks back and forth on the pump to operate the skis.
As for heating the engine, at one company I worked at we had a cutoff temperature of -35 C for the Cessna 206 and 185. We offered the clients our Turbo Beaver instead if they really wanted to fly on that day and shoulder the extra cost. You can operate at lower temperatures but then it leads to a higher instance of shock cooling and cracked cylinder heads on descent. As for heaters, it is too hard on the engine to start without an electric car warmer and engine cover or some kind of pre heater with a piston engine. We usually used both, the car heater then a preheater when it was really cold. If we had to stay at an area with no heat for several hours we would start the engine every couple of hours. Maybe with a good battery you can still start at -30 (but probably not), but anyways it is not worth it, too hard on the engine. The Twin Otter on the other hand, can easily be started at -40 with a good (warm)battery with no pre heat. Still, we would put a small car heater into each engine and into the battery in the arctic as power was usually available. In the antarctic, with no electricity available where I worked, although the manufacturer did not recommend it, on cold days, below -25 C, we would have a pilot or engineer hold the propeller in their hands then start the engine. It is a free turbine, no physical connection from propeller gear box to the engine, just air, thus the propeller can be held stationary and the engine started and run at idle power. This way the drag on the engine from the cold oil and mass of the frozen propeller gear box is removed from the equation, after a 30 seconds or a minute and the engine has stabilized, the propellor is let go. To keep the battery warm we put it in our tent at night and put an old sleeping bag over it, we carried two batteries as sometimes we were hundreds of miles from the nearest airplane and not starting could be a problem.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:16 am
Greg,
it is so nice of you to share these stories. Very valuable addition to the ‘whole picture’. Yes, engine start is a sort of challenge in winter, especially, if it is a piston engine. They say one ‘cold start’ may cost dozens of hours of engine ‘life’. See, here’s a picture showing how they pre-heat an An-2’s big radial in Russia. Although, it is not Siberia (a place nearby Moscow) featured on the pic, the day looks pretty cold
Right now I’m flying with another ex-Kenn Borek guy, by the way
We are discussing an issue of fuel supply in bush and Arctic. So-called ‘fuel caches’, and how operators (and pilots) build up them, and use then, later. Did you ever take fuel from ‘bladders’ for refueling? How did you refuel your Twin Otters from the standard ‘45′ barrels?
It’s a great discussion. I’ll keep posting ‘Siberian bush stuff’ here. There’s one awesome communication is now going on with a guy who flew An-2 in a ‘very authentic bush’ in Yakutia. He also flew the An-38, a small turboprop twin. It would be interesting to compare it with ‘Twotter’. And we’ll do it, for sure!
Keep in touch,
S