Hazard- Snow and Icy Conditions
Snow and winter maintenance at Heathrow Airport
Annual Snow Plan to outline resources and procedures
Keywords
Heathrow has implemented several new technologies and processes in order to provide higher capacity and to increase its resilience to weather disruption. These measures provide adaptation responses under the “action” class identified in the adaptation report, which address challenges such as heavy rainfall events, changes to groundwater levels and increasing variability of snowfall.
Snow could cause delays and /or strategic cancellation of flights. There is likely to be increased pressure on critical de-icing equipment for aircraft resulting in reduced efficiency in operational procedures due to increased time to de-ice planes. Further, build-up may cause cancellation of flights and/or temporary closures of the airfield as snow clearance procedures are required to remove build up and prevent surfaces freezing.
Heathrow’s Airside Snow Plan is implemented once there is a higher than 30% risk of snow to ensure the airport can continue operations. Critical threshold of greater than 20mm/24 hours of lying snow is used to define a moderate event. The objectives of the plan are to:
- Provide adequate response (personnel, equipment and materials) to enable the continued safe operation of the airfield, even if conditions require this to be at a reduced capacity
- Minimise disruption to the operation
- Optimise the available resourcing to support in the delivery of the plan
- Promulgate information on the responsibilities of Heathrow Airport and stakeholders during a winter event
- Meet regulatory requirements
The plan defines key roles, response levels, a communication plan, priority areas for action, vehicular resources and operations team profiles. It also outlines procedures for anti-icing of airfield services and remote aircraft de-iceing along with the media available for deicing. Finally, it provides guidance for assessment of the condition of the aerodrome movement area.The plan is updated every year to supersede the previous year’s plans.
A GBP 37 million investment to improve resilience to snow (following lessons learnt in the 2010 snow event), including additional equipment, new processes for weather forecasting, enhanced command and control structure and a detailed Passenger Welfare Plan.
