Originally Posted by
TuxTom
FWIW, I passed through MSP last week when they received an early season snow storm and the deicing situation was the worse I've ever seen at that airport. Normally, MSP is second to none when it comes to winter operations, but I suspect Covid cutbacks and it being the first winter event of the year combined to make a messy situation. At SLC, I would assume it's a similar story. I would expect deicing operations to improve at SLC once it becomes part of the daily routine, my only concern being understaffing due to Covid.
My deicing "tale of woe" was in 2007 at BWI. This was not long before Delta filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and their various airport vendors were demanding up front cash before they could get service. I was on a 6 am flight to ATL, where I had a tight connection to SMF. My upgrades had cleared on both. However, because of cold wet weather we had to deice. No deicing vehicle was in sight. We were told on board that the deicing truck had broken down and that someone had to come from Pennsylvania to fix it (it was a Sunday morning).
It took 2 hours to get the situation resolved (looking back on it, I wouldn't be surprised that the captain sprung for the deicing on his personal credit card). For me, the worst part of the delay (other than missing out on my upgrade to SMF) was that the FA on this flight wouldn't serve more than one PDB per passenger. As it turned out, I got to SMF only about four hours late. The concierge in the Concourse E Crown Room upgraded my ticket bucket to a full Y ticket, which got me to the top of the upgrade lists, and put me on an ATL-SLC-SMF routing. I got upgraded after getting on board ATL-SLC, and then got upgraded SLC-SMF, so all was well that ended well.