is the middle of the Atlantic at night
coming back from Canada to the UK
in a Hercules
and we encountered mid-Atlantic some icing
that started to build up on the aircraft.
Now, normally what you do is you climb
out of the icing layer
'cause you climb above it
but what was happening was we kept climbing
and we seemed to still be in this icing layer.
I think the engines were starting,
the intakes were starting to ice
because we had a couple of dips in the engines.
Now, if that happened and you're over the UK,
you just wouldn't worry, you'd descend out of it,
you'd go down, you'd find somewhere to land
but when you're mid-Atlantic,
you're faced with if I descend,
I'm too low and I'm burning too much fuel
to get to Cork to the nearest diversion in Ireland
but I can't climb out of it
because the weight of the ice on the aircraft
is building you up and making you too heavy to climb.
We had to make that critical decision
where we actually turned off
the anti-icing system
so we diverted all our power possible to the engines
to try and climb above it.
And we did.
And we started to lose all the ice
but there was just that moment
and I think it was heightened
by the location in the middle of the Atlantic
and it was night and it was dark
and I don't why it just seemed a bit more scary at night
because you thought well,
if we go down, we can't make land.
