Life as a deicer is not for the fainthearted; battling an ice storm whilst being 45ft in the air deicing an aircraft takes a certain calibre of a person. Grit and determination are needed in (pardon the pun) bucketloads.
But this isn’t a problem for Amanda Barry and her deicing team who can’t wait to get out there and brave the elements at Des Moines International Airport in Iowa, day in, day out.
Since October they have deiced more than 400 aircraft, between 30 and 40 planes for an average event, that rises to 200-250 planes when they experience five to six bad snow days.
“We’ve already had an ice storm and a couple of snow storms, but it’s nothing we can’t handle,” said Barry. “All of my entire team love being in the snow, they love deicing. I’m so fortunate because they are so passionate about it,” she said.
Last July, Barry was promoted to General Manager (GM) at IDS, a leading aircraft deicing company in North America, and part of the Inland Group of Companies. She’s the first woman to ever become a GM at IDS and she’s only 26.
She started at the company eight years ago as an entry-level deicer in Cincinnati, Ohio, before rising through the ranks from lead deicer in 2019 then to operation supervisor for a large cargo customer, and now most recently, has been promoted to GM at the new DSM station.
The Des Moines Airport Authority awarded the single service provider contract to IDS last year, starting with the 2024-2025 season.
“I’m very fortunate to be here, I say that all the time,” she said.
“Everyone’s so understanding and nice - there’s that Midwestern charm; it’s a really great fit for me. As a station start-up you are building everything from the ground up, it’s very exciting. But working with my project manager Charles Cooney and regional director Sam Tilley has been wonderful, with their experience of starting up stations, they’ve helped me whenever I needed them. At the end of the day, I’ve built this and it’s going really well. When I go home, I’m really proud, which is really rewarding.”
Preparing for events
As part of her role Barry is responsible for 40 employees, managing ten single-operator trucks during the course of a single shift.
At the beginning of each shift there is a team briefing where they plan how they are going to handle any upcoming weather events, discussing which Type I/Type IV deicing treatment crews may request due to conditions, which more often than not depends on an airline’s requirements.
“It also depends on how airlines want the deicing fluid sprayed or the aircraft type which has rules on what should be sprayed or not, some aircraft only have one or two emergency exits above the doors, and some may have aluminium or composite wings in which case we’ll need to double check it with our hands if the slats don’t come down,” she said.
Each airline may have different handling requirements, and communication is critical to a safe operation.
“For example, one carrier requires you to give them a salute whenever you have finished deicing their aircraft to let them know they’re clean and ready to go.”
She stresses the importance of following safety procedures and having effective communication at the heart of her team’s operation, especially when contamination has been found under the wings and tail of the aircraft and further inspection is needed.
“We’ve got teamwork instilled into us to the point where we’ll double check each other’s work, which helped immensely during the ice storm,” she said.
Their work also consists of ensuring that the deicing trucks are filled at the right percentage of deicing fluid each day so that it will last for the whole operation, and if supplies run low they fill up at the station’s new deicing fluid farm that serves all passenger and cargo carriers at the airport.
When asked what she enjoys most about her role, she said: “It’s 100% the people. I love working with my team. You have people you can rely on, including upper management. In fact, the people make it all possible, without them we’re nothing.”
Supporting women in the industry
Barry says it was during her time at Cincinnati that prepared her for the role at Des Moines airport where she was communicating with pilots and alerting them throughout the deicing process.
“Cincinnati was where I was raised. All of my mentors are based there,” she said.
It was one of these important mentors in her life that she admits helped her get to where she is today within the company.
“One of my direct supervisors, Mark Ten Hagen, was just awesome. Any time that I had any questions, it was easy to go and talk to him. He had this idea if every worker here was a woman, this place would be phenomenal. He was like, ‘women work so hard all the time. They go through so much, and they can just handle and juggle everything. If my entire team could just be all women, I wouldn’t worry about a single thing’. Any time there was a woman who wanted to move up, he was like, ‘alright we’re going to put you to the test if you can handle x, y and z’. The reason he did this a lot of the time was this is a male-dominated field. Some of the issues that came up is you get people who don’t necessarily want to listen to women sometimes. So, it’s either do you rise to the occasion or do you crumble under the pressure? He tries to determine what kind of person you are and how you would be able to handle different scenarios like that,” she said.
Barry found herself facing situations like this in the workplace. “Unfortunately, it’s one of those things. You have to brush it off your shoulders, and get back up at the end of the day.”
Sometimes this requires having a chat about it later. So, Barry would sit down with the employee to try to understand the issue.
“I was really young when I became a lead deicer and it felt like some people didn’t necessarily want to listen or give me the time of day, but it’s just one of those things. You just have to keep on doing what you are doing. People don’t just give you respect, you’ve got to earn it. So, it was like pick yourself up, try it again, you know what you are doing, stick to your guns. You got this, it’s not going to last forever,” she said.
She now shares this advice with other women who find themselves in similar circumstances, saying: “Just knock it off, get back up and just keep going,” adding how lucky she is at IDS, “Out of the 40 employees we have, about 10 to 15 are women who work here, and they are all strong backboned women, so I’m really fortunate.”
This article was published in the February 2025 issue of Ground Handling International, click here to read the digital edition and click here to subscribe.
