Chemical de-icing of planes is known to be very bad for poisoning the local groundwater at airports, so I started to think about mechano-thermal solutions.
There are lots of patents awarded for aircraft de-icing systems -all written in that unintentionally laughable form of English which can only be intended to appeal to some judge (I haven’t been able to find the following in a brief search of various online patent databases).
Today’s invention is for de-icing jet aircraft on a runway. Since, even at idle, the outflow from a jet engine is much hotter than 0 degrees C, the idea is to create a duct mounted on a trolley. One end of this would catch some of the idling aircraft engine’s outflow and redirect it onto the icy wings’ surfaces via a coarse particle filter and some kind of flexible nozzle.