That's a good idea. My advice to everyone is to find out specificaly what icing conditions your aircraft is certified for BEFORE it becomes an issue. I've talked to CRJ pilots and they told me that they were certified for flight into light freezing rain but nothing heavier than that. Nothing at Skyway says specifically that we can operate in "light" freezing rain - they reached that conclusion by a liberal interpretation of the warning in the AFM (i.e. It referred to "freezing rain" and "freezing drizzle" so they assumed Dornier meant "moderate" freezing rain and "moderate" freezing drizzle. When pressed for an answer Dornier Support Services said they meant even "light" freezing precip.) Whether these CRJ operators are using the same interpretation method is anybody's guess (any CRJ/ERJ drivers have any input?).
Here's something that I just learned. Freezing drizzle is actually WORSE than freezing rain. Although the droplets are smaller than freezing rain they are still "large" (100-150 micron) and freezing drizzle tends to have more liquid per unit volume than freezing rain.
Also, the faster you fly in these conditions (up to 350 knots) the worse it is because the impacted drops have more energy (1/2 mv^2) with which to cross streamlines and, therefore, impact aft of the boots. This has to be weighed against the fact that if you fly faster you'll exit the conditions sooner but I always thought that when flying in icing conditions you wanted high speed/low AOA.
Finally, in Bill Rieke's book In-Flight Icing (he's one of the research pilots you see in the NASA training video - also my new best friend
) he states that SLD encounters are extremely dangerous "regardless of the type of ice protection used. No amount of boot cycles or heat on the leading edge of the wing will provide protection for an SLD encounter. There is no aircraft flying today that is protected from this phenomenon". That's 15+ years of SLD experience talking. Of course, my Director of Operations knows better
.