This paper discusses the capabilities and limitations of a new approach to airborne measurements of snow and sea ice thickness. Such measurements can help better understand snow and sea ice processes, and can also contribute to the validation of satellite measurements. The approach discussed here determines physical snow and sea ice thickness by observing the horizontal spread of lidar pulses: The bright halo observed around an illuminated spot extends farther out in thicker layers, because photons can travel longer without escaping through the bottom. Since earlier studies provided ground-based demonstrations of such sea ice retrievals, this paper presents a theoretical analysis of additional uncertainties that arise in airborne observations of snow and sea ice. Snow and sea ice retrievals pose somewhat different challenges because while sea ice is usually much thicker, snow contains a much higher concentration of scatterers. As a result, sea ice halos are larger but snow halos are brighter. The results indicate that airborne sea ice retrievals are possible at night and that snow retrievals are possible during both night and day. For snow thicknesses less than about 50 cm, observational issues such as calibration uncertainty can cause retrieval uncertainties on the order of 10% in 1 km-resolution retrievals. For moderate snow and sea ice thicknesses (<30 cm and 3 m, respectively), these issues cause similar (~10%) uncertainties in sea ice thickness retrievals as well. These results indicate that offbeam lidars have the potential to become an important component of future snow and sea ice observing systems.