and says the better question might be how his team preps for summer. “It can sometimes feel like we’re always in winter mode around here, and now that we’re pushing 48 years here with close to 20 years of deicing under our belts, we’ve come a long way,” Goodwin said. “I suppose, if we hadn’t figured out how to deal with some cold by now, then we’d be in real trouble. This is routine for us. It’s muscle memory at this point.” Northeast Airmotive sees an average of 100 inches of snow annu- ally, but it’s the cold—as low as -20 degrees—and the condensation that are Goodwin’s true adversaries. “We can get our first frost in mid- September and our last in mid-April, but it’s November through February when it gets awfully cold around here, and it’s compounded because we’re right on the ocean,” Goodwin said. “A foot of snow in a six-hour period will basically stop operations here, because the airport shuts down, but that’s rare—I can only remember one or two times in the last sev- eral years. For anything less, we’re on and expected to be on time.” Goodwin is a guy who doesn’t like to make excuses. He prides himself on not letting winter weather slow his team down. Said Goodwin: “There’s a heavy emphasis on delay times for deicing because, if your airplane is late, it causes problems all the way down for the rest of the day; so we have a pretty good system going. In an actual snow storm, the team likes to use air trucks to blow the majority of the snow off the airplanes before they push for the gate, to get a jump start on the deicing process as sort of a pre-service. We’re a relatively small and condensed air- port, so our gates are all in line. That gives us the benefit to just go down the line, shoot the tail, and shoot the wings, so we can limit the time when they go in for deicing. From there we have a pad commander orchestrating the flow of the airliners coming off the queue, sort of like a first-come, first-serve car wash, and we’ll have up to three pads going simultaneously, with an average deice time of three minutes once a plane is on the pad. In the winter, our whole world is making sure we run a safe operation, num- ber one, and an efficient operation, number two. We live in this region, we know snow, so we shouldn’t be using snow as an excuse for de- lays even on the coldest of days.” To get ready for those kinds of days, putting his team in place tops Goodwin’s priority list. Northeast Airmotive begins its winter recruit- ing efforts in June and July. “We start to recruit early for our seasonal deicing help because we need everyone to go through the whole hiring process and because each person goes through background checks, pre-employment physicals, and a combination of in-house train- ing, airline training, and general avia- tion training,” he explained. “We have seven major airlines we work with, so our teams really get the Cadillac ver- sion of all the best training syllabi out there; and everybody here gets exactly the same training. We keep a full- time complement of four to six people from the deicing team year-round so we’re not always starting from scratch, then really ramp it up for the winter when we’re running nine trucks with two people in each truck and typically need 20 to 22 additional people for the season. For us this job is seven days a week and 20 or more hours a day in winter. We really only have June and July to take a pause. Continued on page 31 Aviation Business Journal | 4th Quarter 2016 29 Photo courtesy of Heritage Aviation
