Indeed, I started my first business washing airplanes at age 12. Cleaning airplanes at the airport isn’t as easy as it might seem, especially for a short skinny kid trying to clean the tops of the wings. One of the most important things is to use lots of water and a little bit of high-pressure to get all that grit and sand off the top of the aircraft so that when you are applying pressure from a soap met or a soft bristle brush you don’t end up putting minute scratches on the painted surfaces, as this can lead to future corrosion. Okay so, let’s talk about this for second shall we?
Most aircraft, especially light aircraft have very thin paint jobs, this is because paint does have weight, and the more weight in paint which is put onto the aircraft the less it will be able to carry and still take off. Performance is very important in a light aircraft, and they are made with special materials and constructed in a special way to keep them as light as possible. If you take a few gallons of paint from a paint store and carry them out, you will know how heavy that paint can be.
A small Cessna might have a 40-50 foot wingspan, and that means it has quite a few square feet of surface to cover with that paint. The last thing you want to do is go through the top layer of the paint job which is already ultra-thin. Now then, when cleaning light aircraft at Desert Airports one has to be very careful because the sand and grit attaches itself in all the crevices and cracks. When you hit it with a pressure washer, you can’t use too much pressure, or you can pull pieces of paint off, and even under low pressure, all of that sand comes out from those areas, and if you are moving it around as you soap you are basically sanding the surface of the plane.
This is why it takes extra water, and extra time to do it right. It also means you need to use a foam type soap which helps pick-up the granulars of dust and sand, so you can blast them away without rubbing it around too much. Another issue is that when you use more water, there is more of an issue with the reclamation of that water if you are working on the ramp and not at the wash rack where there will be a triple-trap or clarifier.
If you are designing a washing rig to clean aircraft, you will need a larger water tank to clean aircraft at a desert airport than you will at a more rural airport without such sandy features surrounding the field. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
