I recently acquired the ADL120 and used it on my trip to Norway. It is extremely useful if you have scattered areas of convective activity, especially if you have enough images to make an animation. The radar image is updated only every 15 minutes so you need to give wide berth to anything you may want to avoid and take the wind direction into account.
Wish I had ADL on my yesterdays trip from Hungary to Belgium. My stormscope didn’t paint anything but this doesn’t mean you can have a rough ride
I spent 3.5 hours in IMC with moderate turbulence. Icing FL080 all the way almost with some light SLD when driving through some clouds. FL060 was fine .
The Bonanza handles turbulence well though I sometimes had an impression that I was in jojo shoving back and forth the throttle all the time.to stay below Va
Again I think that a turbo with no de icing or anti ice is no solution as the icing was potentially on all levels from FL080 till FL180 and higher IMHO…
I wish I had a hot prop that’s the first thing that affects my performance. Once some ice sticks to it it takes a while to shed it off.you need to go down ..meanwhile the whole air frame shakes….
So do I want a turbo? Yes when it comes with TKS …A Hot prop is a good thing…
You will get ice in IMC when below 0C – nothing can tell you where this may or may not happen.
May not happen right away, may not happen for some minutes, but prob100 it will happen eventually if it is dense and the temp is right (-5C is the best).
And sublimation is very slow. I have seen say 3mm of ice taking 1 hour to sublimate away, in sunlight and -10C to -20C.
A deiced prop is brilliant – I would never give up my TKS prop.
I never had prop icing that caused the airplane to vibrate but plenty of structural ice. Don’t think a heated prop would make any difference. Turbo allows you to try different altitudes fairly quickly. Most often icing is found in a rather thin layer.
What you really need is an engine that takes you above IMC and does so quickly. In a jet, deicing is almost never required. Flying in IMC for prolonged time sucks. Those flights are the ones where I wish I’d taken CAT or not gone on the journey at all.
So here we are again..icing season in the lower levels. 
the freezing levels are lowering and my frustration levels are rising by only having a HOT pitot tube..!@#$%^& .
Achim what kind of prop do you have…? I think yesterday you would have it encountered on all reasonable FL levels. <FL180…the sort of icing would prob be different….IMHO
2 blade large McCauley turning very slowly (2100 normally, 2300 when time of of the essence). I’ve had plenty of ice everywhere, window fully iced up, etc., some situations where I got worried but I never had a noticeable prop imbalance. I would have a much better use of leading edge deicing than prop deicing from my experience even though the former implies the latter.
I have a three blade mac no scimitar, encountered almost every time air-frame vibrations due to ice build up. I see it on my OAT scott probe sticking out on how the ice forms.
When its this typical clear ice kind then within minutes it starts to shake….So for me the only way is down in this case as going up does not shed the ice………
Vref wrote:
My stormscope didn’t paint anything but this doesn’t mean you can have a rough ride
I no longer trust the stormscope to keep me out of thunderstorms (CB) since an unfortunate encounter with an area heavily charged with electricity.
I was on an IFR flight from Avignon to Pontoise and was approaching Troyes after entering IMC. The stormscope had been painting two cells at about 25 NM in the 10 and 2 o’clock positions when all of a sudden it showed us surrounded by electrical activity. The radio started to emit static and I saw a flash in the corner of my eye. I could tell my wife had seen it too because she went quiet. Then another flash from the opposite side of the plane.
To me, the stormscope is a good complement to the ADL (which I did not have at the time, and which would undoubtedly told me I should perform a precautionary landing) but ideally the (en-route portion of the) flight should of course be conducted in VMC for everybody’s enjoyment.
A pilot I know was once flying a TB20 near Corfu, in IMC, and quite suddenly her stormscope lit up all around like an xmas tree. She managed to come out of it alive but pretty scared.
the (en-route portion of the) flight should of course be conducted in VMC for everybody’s enjoyment.
Definitely, if there is any convective activity forecast, or if it looks obvious.
This is easier nowadays because you can get the Blitzortung sferics display, 1 minute delayed, via a Thuraya satellite phone, in something like 20 seconds
and this presentation is very accurate and reliable. I can be sitting at home and see one flash and sure enough it will be on there a minute later, at exactly the right location.
A stormscope is good as a “don’t go there” device but sferics gives you the wider picture.
You can also get this via Achim’s Telegram service but IME the connectivity is highly variable. It really depends on 4G (LTE) and is marginally possible with 3G/HSPA. But sometimes you get no connection for hours. And then it works great for a bit.
