De-Icing at the Anchorage Airport
De-Icing at the Anchorage Airport
De-Icing at the Anchorage Airport
Jet Enviro De-Icing wants to improve aviation safety and keep toxic
antifreeze chemicals out of Cook Inlet by leasing land at the airport
for an FAA-approved infrared de-icing hangar.
Currently, airline carriers at the Anchorage International Airport use
thousands of gallons of ethylene glycol-containing antifreeze to
defrost planes every winter, and during bad weather, the levels far
exceed permit limits with the EPA. Untreated glycol goes into Lake Hood
and Cook Inlet and sucks the oxygen out of the water. In November, the
EPA is coming out with new draft regulations that will be much
stricter, and it would cost $100 million to build an antifreeze
treatment facility.
The infrared de-icing hangar proposed by Jet Enviro De-Icing has many
advantages, and ACE supports it. It is the only non-glycol de-icing
method approved by the FDA, and has already been adopted at Newark,
JFK, Oslo, Rhinelander, Bejing, the USAF, and Dallas/Fort Worth
airports. Infrared technology works not by heat, but by the frequency
of the light waves decrystallizing the structure of snow and ice. This
will reduce the amount of glycol used by FedEx, Alaska Air, and UPS by
a whopping 90%. It also has a carbon footprint that is 10% of the
traditional glycol antifreeze spray operation, which requires the
continuous running of many spray trucks that must continuously idle and
burn fuel in the winter. The units also recycle what little antifreeze
they do require. This method is also safer for pilots, because it
deices the plane right before takeoff, and eliminates the bottleneck of
all the spay trucks running around on the tarmac. Jet Enviro De-Icing
is applying for a lease of airport land, and is not spending any
taxpayer funds to build the hangar.
In July 2008, ACE submitted comments to the airport in favor of granting this
lease.
Additional Documentation and Information:
Public Notice for Comments (PDF 122 KB)
FAA Award (PDF 303 KB)
JEDI Brochure on Infrared De-Icing (PDF 489 KB)
Letter from the President of JEDI (PDF 17 KB)
