[Dutch]

I'm sure there is worse weather to take off in, but I passed through Dulles Tuesday night and it wasn't great weather. I watched my plane (resting at the gate) get a few inches of snow on it in the few hours I was stuck there...after a long period of inactivity, other planes started to taxi out and get the de-ice treatment...I saw the big board showing 70% of all flights cancelled and was prepared to head to a hotel. But my plane, like quite a few others in the early evening were not delayed at all and when my time arrived, they said we could board. The snow wasn't coming down too hard, but poor visibility and dusk just made it look bad.

Then we got on the plane and waited for an hour because of a log-jam of planes getting de-iced. I could peak out the window from my aisle seat every once in a while but couldn't see much through the falling snow that was swirling around the windows. Finally we started to taxi, through the snow and over to the de-icing vehicles where we got blasted by the de-icers for a few minutes (sounded like taking your car through the car wash). We then got the green light to proceed to takeoff and we headed to the runway and fired up the jets...just after takeoff, the plane started making this strange higher pitched noise like one of the engines was struggling (sounded almost like it turned into a prop plane) and the off-duty pilot in front of me took off his headphones to listen to it, which was pretty unsettling.

Once we were up in altitude the tension faded...but the whole experience was not something I was looking forward to repeating anytime soon.