Narrative:

There were 2 unsafe conditions -- significant ice left in engines and potentially incorrect procedures to remove the ice. During walkaround preflight; I found a huge amount of loose ice chunks lying inside the #2 engine cowl. After 3 or 4 sweeps of my entire arm clearing the FOD; I then started to clear the smaller chunks. At this time I noticed a large amount of clear ice that obviously was puddle water which had frozen (about a frisbee size) to the bottom of the intake. In addition; the fan blades had significant clear ice on them too. Both of these areas were frozen solid and could not be removed by hand. The #1 engine cowl and fan was in similar condition with un-removable frozen ice but had less 'loose' chunks than #2. I cleared both engines out as best I could and informed the captain with a suggestion to call maintenance. He decided to rather call iceman and have them deal with it; suggesting to me that they spray fluid in the engines. I mentioned this was a bad idea and potentially damaging. At the same time; we overheard another crew ask iceman for the very same thing -- wanting to have deicing fluid in the engine. Iceman was smart enough to know this was not correct and sent for a supervisor. The supervisor correctly guided us and the other crew to have pc air used to melt the ice. No further problems were noted at this point. First; there is no excuse to have an originating aircraft be left in such poor condition at a maintenance base. I hazard to guess the engine covers were partially to blame and may have contributed to the ice build-up if incorrectly installed. The ground crew removing them were extremely negligent in my opinion as there was no regard to the condition in which the engines were left. Second; crews do not seem to know that deicing fluid is potentially very damaging to the engines. This point needs to be made clearly somewhere in the vast sea of fom procedures. Luckily; iceman was trained well enough to not allow this to happen. ZZZ is a fairly large maintenance base but what scares me is the smaller stations with less experience combined with a crew's poor remedy in this same situation. Significant ice build-up and FOD inside engine cowl found during preflight.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: A B737 pilot notes large amounts of ice and snow in both engine's inlets during preflight. The ice had frozen the fans and ground air was used to thaw the ice where de-ice fluid may damage engine components.

Narrative: There were 2 unsafe conditions -- significant ice left in engines and potentially incorrect procedures to remove the ice. During walkaround preflight; I found a huge amount of loose ice chunks lying inside the #2 engine cowl. After 3 or 4 sweeps of my entire arm clearing the FOD; I then started to clear the smaller chunks. At this time I noticed a large amount of clear ice that obviously was puddle water which had frozen (about a Frisbee size) to the bottom of the intake. In addition; the fan blades had significant clear ice on them too. Both of these areas were frozen solid and could not be removed by hand. The #1 engine cowl and fan was in similar condition with un-removable frozen ice but had less 'loose' chunks than #2. I cleared both engines out as best I could and informed the Captain with a suggestion to call Maintenance. He decided to rather call Iceman and have them deal with it; suggesting to me that they spray fluid in the engines. I mentioned this was a bad idea and potentially damaging. At the same time; we overheard another crew ask Iceman for the very same thing -- wanting to have deicing fluid in the engine. Iceman was smart enough to know this was not correct and sent for a Supervisor. The Supervisor correctly guided us and the other crew to have PC air used to melt the ice. No further problems were noted at this point. First; there is no excuse to have an originating aircraft be left in such poor condition at a Maintenance Base. I hazard to guess the engine covers were partially to blame and may have contributed to the ice build-up if incorrectly installed. The Ground Crew removing them were extremely negligent in my opinion as there was no regard to the condition in which the engines were left. Second; crews do not seem to know that deicing fluid is potentially very damaging to the engines. This point needs to be made clearly somewhere in the vast sea of FOM procedures. Luckily; Iceman was trained well enough to not allow this to happen. ZZZ is a fairly large Maintenance Base but what scares me is the smaller stations with less experience combined with a crew's poor remedy in this same situation. Significant ice build-up and FOD inside engine cowl found during preflight.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.