Stockholm Arlanda Airport - Winter Time Operations and Snow Clearing

Winter Time Operations and Snow Clearing

Since its opening Stockholm Arlanda has always managed to continue its operations during heavy snowfall and difficult weather. The airport administration claims to be world-leading at clearing snow from the runways. Arlanda has a policy to never close due to snowfall. Heavy snowfall can however cause delays. During heavy snowfall at least one runway stays open but in bad weather condition there may be delays even if flight operations continue at all times. Not just runways need to be cleared, aprons and aircraft parking areas need snow clearing as well. The airport has a total of 250 000 m2 to clear from snow and ice, at the same time as the aircraft continue taking off and landing. During the colder half of the year Stockholm Arlanda has about 65 seasonally hired snow removal staff. Together with permanent staff, they form a team of 100 people who provide snow removal services. Special routes are planned for sweeping teams, which clear each route at intervals of 35 to 45 minutes. The sweeping teams are directed via radio from the air traffic control tower. When snow removal is completed on each runway the surface is tested by a friction vehicle which measures friction value. The airport announces the friction value, and then it is each pilot who decides whether this value is sufficient for a landing. The friction value determines how often a runway must be ploughed and treated with anti-skid agent.

Read more about this topic:  Stockholm Arlanda Airport

Famous quotes containing the words winter time, winter, time, operations, snow and/or clearing:

    When I was a bachelor, I lived by myself
    And I worked at the weaver’s trade;
    The only, only, thing that I ever did wrong
    Was to woo a fair young maid.
    I wooed her in the winter time,
    And in the summer too;
    And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong
    Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.
    Unknown. The Foggy, Foggy Dew (l. 1–8)

    Stands the Spring! heralded by its bright-clothed
    Trumpeters, of bough and bush and branch;
    Pale Winter draws away his white hands, loathed,
    And creeps, a leper, to the cave of time.
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    It is time to be old,
    To take in sail:—
    The god of bounds,
    Who sets to seas a shore,
    Came to me in his fatal rounds,
    And said: ‘No more!’
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    Each person sweeps the snow before his own door, and never minds the frost on another family’s roof.
    Chinese proverb.

    Though the words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which might be the colored portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)