Flying planes in cold air with visible moisture carries potential challenges with icing. Obviously, winter weather brings cold air, but so does flying at higher altitudes almost any time of the year. Pilots need to understand the capabilities and limitations of ice protection on their aircraft or the lack thereof. Today, protection from the threat of ice remains a preferred factory-installed option among many general aviation pilots.
The preferred ice protection on most new general aviation aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles is TKS, according to CAV Ice Protection. There’s a long history to the forerunner companies before them that goes back to the 1940s Royal Air Force war effort with deicing systems. The acronym TKS is synonymous with deicing fluid; however, the origins are not from the fluid itself. The acronym was derived from the company names commissioned by the War Office to combine their innovative expertise, which included Tecalemit metering pumps and filters; Kilfrost de-icing chemicals; and Sheepbridge Stokes metal components and tubes.
Cirrus and CAV Ice Protection collaborated on their ice safety system design, and it’s been installed on over 5,000 Cirrus planes. In this weblog series we’ll provide context and review improvements between the original inadvertent ice protection and the certified Flight Into Known Icing (FIKI) system on the iconic Cirrus SR22 airplane.
This is the first installment of a seven-part series “TKS – A Clear Solution to Icing,” by Jeffrey Brewer, CEO/Founder of Connecting Aviators®.
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