Riding the Mobile Lounge at Dulles Airport in Northern VA just outside the Washington DC area. We're going from one terminal to the other. From the wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_I...
"Dulles is one of the few remaining airports to use the "mobile lounge" system for boarding and disembarkation from aircraft. The "lounge" consists of a 54-by-16-foot carriage mounted on a scissor truck, capable of carrying 102 passengers. When mobile lounges were first introduced, they had ramps at one end that could be raised or lowered to the floor height of an aircraft. However, when they were retrofitted to be used only for inter-terminal passenger transport, the ramps were removed and doors that could interlock with a terminal building were fitted to either end. Mobile lounges have a driver's cab at each end. The airport's designers thought that by shuttling from the main terminal directly to a midfield jet ramp, they could save passengers from long walking distances amidst weather, noise, and fumes on the ramp. But the advent of the jet bridge and construction of the midfield concourses diluted the system's advantages.
Before, the airport used 19 mobile lounges to transfer passengers between the midfield concourses and to and from the main terminal building, as well as 30 plane mates. They have all been given names based on the postal abbreviations of 50 states.
A new train system began in 2010 to transport passengers between the concourses and the main terminal. The train is intended to replace the mobile lounges. Mobile lounges continue to service the D Concourse from both the main terminal and the A Concourse. Mobile lounges will continue to transport international arrivals to the IAB facility. Dulles has stated that the wait time for a train does not exceed four minutes, compared to the average 15-minute wait and travel time for mobile lounges."
23 май 2009
