Getting out of Montreal

Well it turns out I was wrong when I said "hopefully we'll have no problems getting out." As I went to bed that night in Montreal, I looked out the window and saw that the snow had already turned to rain, and figured that would melt a great deal of the snow before morning. When I woke up it was still raining, and I saw what looked a frozen water stream dripping down the outside of my window, which was not good. Instead of rain, the snow had turned to freezing rain. The temperature on the ground never got above freezing like it was supposed to.

When we got to the plane, it was coated in ice. As our captain said, "this thing is a giant Popsicle." The ground was covered in frozen slush that was very slippery to walk on, but I got some really good pictures of what I'm talking about.

As we taxied over to the deicing pad on the snow and frozen slush, it probably took about three times as much power to go about one quarter the speed that we usually taxi, and after the deicing crew had been spraying their hot glycol on our plane for over a half hour, we realized that we would not have enough fuel to get to Cleveland by the time we took off, so we returned to the gate, an hour and a half after we left.

After we refueled (and took on as much extra gas as we could carry), there ended up being a huge line for the deicing pad. We waited at the gate for about 45 minutes to be able to push back again, and then once we got out we waited about another 45 minutes in what was basically a line to get into the actual deicing line. Once we got into the real deicing line, it was probably another hour for that line and the deicing process itself.

We finally got to the snowy, slushy runway, applied full takeoff power, and after the plane slid just a foot or two forward I released the brakes and we finally got out of Montreal, about 4 1/2 hours later than we were supposed to.

Enjoy the pictures.