Airport News
Chopin Airport maintenance services have completed preparations for winter. Thanks to its state-of-the-art snow removal equipment, which is the finest in Poland, the Warsaw airport can maintain smooth operation even in heavy snow.
The Airport Maintenance Service is well prepared for the 2013/14 Winter Season, with 10 new MB2041/Øveraasen snow clearing units (each of which consists of a snowplow with a working width of 6.8 m mounted on a MB truck and an Overaasen RS400 sweeper with a broom system and a powerful blower), as well as a large Damman spreader, offering much better performance than the equipment used before, allowing for removing snow from the runways in a single 25-30 minute pass. Aprons and taxiways will be cleared with 6 older snow removal units and 5 dedicated compact sweepers. The Airport Maintenance Service also has another 41 machines and devices at its disposal.
“The staff who use this equipment are well trained, comprehensively skilled and, just as importantly, committed to their job. We are well prepared for the upcoming winter and you can rest assured that we will do our best to make sure passengers and cargo get to and from Warsaw on time and without any problems,” said Jan Michalak, Head of the Airport Maintenance Service.
The airport uses Ice Alert, one of the most advanced systems of its kind in Europe. The system consists of six measurement points located on both runways, each equipped with completely unique, patented BOSO and ARCTIS runway surface sensors and data processors, making the conditions in which ice is likely to form much easier to predict. This is possible thanks to an automatic computer analysis of a number of parameters, including the air and surface temperature, surface dampness, relative air humidity, precipitation type and amount etc.
Chopin Airport spent a record amount of over 20.5 million zlotys on winter maintenance in the 2012/13 winter season. Snowfall was recorded on 60 days (the first on the 27 October and the last on 5 April), almost twice as many as in the 2011/12 season. The number of days with melt-freeze periods was also very high, standing at 68; when temperature drops, wet runways require using chemical agents.
Difficult weather conditions meant the consumption of de-icing chemicals soared to record levels. Over 3.1 thousand tons of both solid and liquid deicers (all eco-friendly, harmless to the environment) were used from October to April, almost double the figure for the previous two seasons put together.
“It was the worst winter for the airport that I can remember. And I should know, I’ve been working here for more than 30 years,” said Wiktor ZiemiÅ„ski, director of Chopin Airport’s Technical Bureau. “It needs to be stressed, however, that despite the extreme weather conditions, the airport didn’t close for a single day, remaining open to air traffic throughout the entire winter season.”
