Good photo of a 182 being towed down the road! Based on the
METAR data, conditions were certainly conducive for carburetor
heat, but were they really too extreme for carburetor heat to be
effective?

Sounds like he didn't realize he had ice until he hit the throttle and
nothing
happened. By that time, there wouldn't be any carb heat.

George Patterson
None of us is as dumb as all of us.

For what it's worth, I had the carb heat cable break on a Mooney Ranger a long
time ago.

That airplane liked to develop carb ice. The EGT was a good indicator of it
forming, as I remember.

I was flying a NDB approach in snow -- the storm came on hours before it was
forcasted to. When I tried to fly the miss I pushed in throttle and nothing
happened. I already had carb heat on and I I tried everything -- landing
lights, gear, radios -- everything. I found when I pulled the mixture back the
engine developed a little power. I was able to fly I think to Scranton on
feeble power, hand flew an ILS to near minimums in snow storm -- I was not
going to miss that approach.

Anyhow, got down, we rented a car and got to where we wanted to go. When it was
time to fly the airplane again it started up fine, but during the runup when I
pulled on the carb heat knob it just came out of the panel -- like a foot of
it!

The moral of the story is, if all else fails, you may be able to get some power
by messing with the mixture.

The event still scares me, that storm dumped half a foot or more in the
mountains of eastern PA, they never would have found us had we gone down!

What I remember most about the storm is NY center told me airports to the west
of my destination were experiencing snow, those abeam it and to the east were
not reporting problems. I thought I had a decent chance of making the approach.


In the 15 or 20 minutes it took for me to get to Scranton they went from pretty
good conditions to fairly low IFR. I think I had a mile or so of vis when I
touched down.