Pilot Heat / De-Ice

The 'De-Ice' switch is for getting the ice of your windscreen.

The 'Pilot Heat' remains a mystery to me.

There is a 'Pitot Heat' switch and to understand what the Pitot tube does you could have a look at this ➡ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitot

Thanks for your reply!

When does the windscreen ice up? Ive not seen that one yet.

I'm not sure it does in FS9 but in cold weather at high altitude it will freeze quite easily.

The pitot heat, heats the pitot tube on the exterior of the aircraft which measures the aircrafts speed, to stop it icing

😉

What happens in FS9, if the air is cold enough is that you'll be cruising along at 300 KIAS and all of a sudden, your KIAS drops to zero, your auto throttle kicks your engines to full and unless you act quickly, you're way overspeed.

I've had it happen a couple of times. Once, on the way into Anchorage, Alaska, I even had it happen with the pitot heat on. 😳

The pitot tube is a small tube on the nose or wing of an aircraft that measures ram air pressure for the airspeed indicator. The hole is small and susceptible to ice accumulation. If it Ices over you will lose airspeed indication(water drain hole open). In a small aircraft, you turn on pitot heat when in visible moisture with a outside temperature(OAT) that is below freezing. Airline aircraft normally fly with the pitot heat on all the time because they almost always fly in sub freezing temperature's and encounter clouds often.

There are actually three Ice protection systems on jet aircraft.
1. windshield
2. wings
3. engine inlet

I think that the one system that is simulated in Flight Simulator is the Wing de-ice/anti-ice. You turn these on with a Total Air Temperature(TAT) 5 degrees C or less in visible moisture. There are some airspeeds also but that's the basics. On a jet, the OAT gage reads higher that actual because of the speed. This is ram rise. Ram rise is not much below 200 knots. At Mach .80 it's about 29 degrees. OAT+ram rise=TAT. On modern jets the Electronic Flight Instrument give you TAT and OAT or SAT Static Air Temperature, automatically.🙂

The windshield ices up the same as pitot tube, not simulated in Flight Simulator.

Excellent, thanks for you replies folks. Much more confusing than what I thought it would be lol

In the Lear 35 the pitot heat is turned on during the lineup checklist, just prior to takeoff and isn't turned off again until the after landing checklist. Anti-icing is used in flights through visible moisture (precipitation and/or clouds) when the outside air temperature is between 10 degrees C to minus 35 degrees C.