No kidding icing is scary.
I had a fairly significant icing encounter during my IFR training (with an instructor) that really brought home some lessons for me. When you're flying VFR you can see the weather around you and if you're proactive easily deviate to get around bad stuff. When you're IFR and in IMC, in particular in busy airspace, you can quite easily end up getting vectored into stuff you wouldn't chose to fly into normally. We were vectored into what turned out to be icing conditions to make room for some landing F-16s. You can't see the weather when you're in the clouds, and controllers don't have magic weather sensing powers.

I hate ice.

As was pointed out somewhere on this forum before: new pilots are really scared the first time they accidentally get into ice. The next time it happens they think "Well I made it last time" and are not as nervous. That is a really bad cycle. Gump described it well, after a while you have an epiphany and you are scared of it again.

No two icing events are the same, it can be benign, or it can come on so fast, that you can't see out of a windshield that you could see out of two minutes before.

The quote "a cessna will hold a lot of ice" is dangerous and should come with a huge qualifier, a cessna will hold a lot of some kinds of ice, other kinds it is coming out of the sky with very little.

Oh please don't think im going to go out and look for ice now! I don't know if I sounded confident about being in ice or not...the joys of not being face to face because of computers! I will tell you this, I was and I still am terrified at the notion of icing in the 182...it has a heated pitot tube that's it!


The comment about 182's carrying ice...that was from a good friend and instructor buddy, I was in no way shape or form trying to tell people that they will carry ice, it was just a weird moment I had while in the condition that made me think back to what he said. "well I heard they carry ice...and now im carrying ice"

I don't want you guys to think that after this experience im carrying some sort of bravado like...been there done that!



Mike

Thank god I had the key and master off and that I don't have a generator!!

Can someone smarter than me explain what exactly a generator has to do with the equation? I am failing to understand the difference between leaving the master and key off with a generator vs. an alternator. I have left the master on with both alternator and generator and both resulted in a dead battery. Is there a difference?

Glad you made it down safely Mike. We've all done something stupid/scary at least once in our flying careers. Learn from it and move on. This is also why I don't fly over the Sierras except early in the morning in perfect weather. I love flying in our boring flat valley.

I may be a chicken, but I'm a live chicken.

scottf wrote:

Thank god I had the key and master off and that I don't have a generator!!

Can someone smarter than me explain what exactly a generator has to do with the equation? I am failing to understand the difference between leaving the master and key off with a generator vs. an alternator. I have left the master on with both alternator and generator and both resulted in a dead battery. Is there a difference?

Hand prop the generator bird and all is well, you have power and the battery will charge.
Hand prop the alternator bird and it will run, thats it, no electrical.