Comment

Comment by Steve Weston on January 14, 2017 at 6:42pm

Snow can be an issue but frozen water AKA ice is or can be big trouble.
One day I had a student and the weather was freezing. Student did the preflight and luckily I rechecked his inspection. The ailerons have drain holes in the trailing edge but when ice formed it trapped water in the structure. With about one gallon of frozen water inside the flight might have been deadly. Picture eight pounds of weight inside of ailerons.....
When doing a preflight always check for unusual weight of the controls.
FYI

Comment by Phil Weston on January 13, 2017 at 3:11pm

To be honest dad it all depends on snow water content from what I'm reading. wet vs dry. Cubic foot of dry snow weighs half even less than wet snow
According to U of Utah. But those are structure roof snow loads. I would be concerned if one had 2-3 feet of wet snow on a flat wing. The bigger concern IMHO is water flowing in between the skin overlaps and freezing. Water expands when it freezes. My Cherokee is now buried in 3 ft of wet snow. So when the thaw come I will look it over real close.

Comment by Bob Pustell on December 28, 2014 at 8:36pm

I have yet to hear of snow loads collapsing or damaging an aircraft. They are stressed for many G's of load plus safety margins. That makes for a structure that would require a mountain of snow to damage. You have most likely seen pictures of aircraft wings being stress tested in development - great stacks of wieght are put onto them to develop the same loads as a four or six G manuever. The only way I have heard of snow damaging an aircraft is if the tailcone skin gets damaged when a trike gets enough snow of the tailfeathers to drop the tail to the ground. Take a look at the first picture in this series -- it is a 601XL wing being load tested - it looks like the bags are fertilizer, that is a LOT of weight on that wing, far more than snow would ever impose. http://www.zenithair.com/zodiac/6-photo-testing.html