Thanks for a very interesting post, Heathrow Tower – and glad you were able to get out to enjoy a break before the weather hit!
Originally Posted by
Heathrow Tower
Unfortunately, there are many companies that offer such services at LHR, and so there is no central control of all the aircraft de-icing resources. However this is something HAL are working on. Varying levels of SLAs between the companies and airlines mean that sometimes a crew will be called away from de-icing one aircraft from airline A to de-ice and aircraft from airline B because they offer B the gold service and A only the silver service. By the time they are finished with B, they need to start again from scratch on A.
Without making this too political, this
really does strike me as somewhat ridiculous… I mean, I understand the logic of an airline outsourcing services like catering and cleaning, and presumably de-icing comes under this kind of arrangement. But when you have the kind of fragmentation described above, it highlight the perverse disincentives and inefficiencies inherent to such an approach!