Channel 5 reports on the 10:30 a.m. incident involving a Delta plane. The Boston Fire Department sent a truck to Runway 33L, but it quickly left the scene. Boston Police tweet "an unknown fluid" in the plane's ventilation system caused fumes in the plane.
Comments
Panic much?
This is at least the third incident involving a kerfluffle over deicing fluid at Logan that I can recall this week...Is the staff doing the deicing having issues with aim? Do we have a sudden influx of southern pilots who don't know what the stuff smells like (though, watching the weather news, they're gonna have to learn), or is this simple panic going on?
Co-worker aboard the flight
This wasn't a little nasty smell. This was "plane catching fire" or "critical components overheating" levels of nasty smell.
Don't be so flip - from the description I got from a first hand witness, I would have been concerned ... and my Dad is a deicing consultant! If I can identify the smell of it in a sample of river water, I know what it smells like!
I'm trying to understand why
I'm trying to understand why this is a re-occurring issue at Logan, where everyone should be an expert with this stuff. The report is that the cause of the smell was deicing fluid; does the report from your co-worker suggest that that report was wrong?
Depends on how much and where it goes
A little deicing fluid is no big deal, as you noted. A lot can be nasty.
Consider as well that any fresh air taken in will pass over heaters - if there is a lot of deicer in that air or it has been sprayed deep into the intakes, it will burn off and the smoke will go into the plane.
Ahhh!
So they *are* smelling smoke, not the fluid, and therefore it is not easily identifiable as harmless?
That makes more sense.
Still leaves the question of why this seems to be happening alot. In-expert application to the plane?