During ice management operations, creating narrow parallel channels with icebreakers can effectively reduce ice floe sizes for the protected vessel/structure. Yet too narrow channel spacing requirement shall lead to excessive or even unpractical ice management operations. Empirical experience shows an almost 1:1 relationship between ‘downstream floe size’ and ‘parallel channel spacing’ while designing an ice management operation. However, before this paper, there exists no dedicated parallel channel tests with strictly controlled channel spacing and sufficient instrumentation to quantify such relationship. In this paper, we report two parallel channel tests, which have been conducted in September 2015 during an expedition to the Arctic Ocean with icebreakers, Oden and Frej. During the test, helicopter images and an onboard camera were utilised to document the parallel channel fracturing events. With the collected data, we strive to quantify if there is a prominent relationship between parallel channel spacing and the corresponding managed ice floe size. In order to analyse the floe size distribution and its relationship with channel spacing from helicopter images, we developed an image segmentation method that propagates visually identifiable seeding cracks in the image. In addition, onboard camera images were utilised to yield the frequency of parallel channel fracturing events. Given the ice conditions and Oden's specific structural form, with all the different channel spacing tested, it turned out that a channel spacing over 200 m would already prohibit the development of parallel channel fracturing events. Most of the observed events take place when the spacing is smaller than around 100 m. In addition, as was expected, more frequent fractures are taking place with narrower channel spacing, e.g., distances smaller than 30 m. The relationship between managed ice floe size and channel spacing are studied. It is found that almost all (100%) of the produced downstream floe sizes are smaller than twice the channel spacing; 90% of them are smaller than 1.5 times of the spacing; and the majority of them (from 46% to 80%, depending on the spacing distance) are smaller than 1 time of the channel spacing. With such quantified relationships, we can practically estimate the size of the managed ice floes based on known/expected channel spacing.