Mobile lounge
A mobile lounge is a system for boarding and disembarking from aircraft using a bus-like vehicle.
Purpose
The mobile lounge was an innovative feature of the
Application
The mobile lounge is used at
While it is still used at Dulles Airport, the growth in passenger numbers and aircraft capacity made it impractical to use mobile lounges for individual flights. Remote concourses were constructed, and the fleet of mobile lounges was used as a shuttle between the concourses and the main terminal. On January 26, 2010, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority replaced the Dulles mobile lounge system for passenger movements between the Main Terminal and the A-, B-, and C-Gates with the underground AeroTrain. However, some mobile lounges and plane mates remain in use for passenger movements between the main terminal and Concourse D (until the replacement Concourses C and D are built and the AeroTrain is built out to run in a continuous two-way loop), to disembark international passengers from all arriving international aircraft (with the exception of United Airlines and certain Star Alliance flights, which are directly serviced at Concourse C's Federal Inspection Station; and flights from airports with border preclearance) and carry them to the International Arrivals Building, and to convey passengers between the main terminal and aircraft on hard stands (i.e., those parked remotely on the tarmac without access to jet bridges).[3]
PTVs are still in use at the Philadelphia International Airport at Terminals A-East and A-West. The PTVs are utilized to support international flights in A-East and A-West during peak times, when no regular gates are available.[4]
Variants
Passenger Transfer Vehicle (PTV)
The Passenger Transfer Vehicle or Passenger Transport Vehicle (PTV) (mobile lounge) is a 16.5-by-5-meter carriage mounted on a scissor truck, capable of carrying 102 passengers. These vehicles were designed by the
Plane Mate
The Plane Mate is an evolutionary variation on the mobile lounge concept. They are similar in appearance to mobile lounges, but can raise themselves on screws (parts of which are contained in a pair of fin-like towers above the vehicles) to "mate" directly with an aircraft. These are used at Dulles and Trudeau. This allows passengers to deplane directly aboard and be carried to the main terminal. They are easily identified by the different window configuration. More noticeably, plane mates have two short columns on the roof with yellow beacons mounted on the top, and have an accordion-like canopy at one end (similar to the canopy seen at the end of a jet bridge) and have only one driver's cab and one set of steering wheels at the canopy end.
NASA Crew Transport Vehicles
Early in the space shuttle program, NASA used the Plane Mate system of mobile lounge to move
Gallery
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NASA crew transport vehicle docked at data collection facility
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NASA crew transport vehicle used to move space shuttle astronauts from the orbiter
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A plane mate atDulles Airport
See also
Mobile lounges.
- Astronaut transfer van
- Mobile Quarantine Facility
References
- ISBN 097248812X.
Eero Saarinen mobile lounge.
- ^ Eames, Charles; Eames, Ray (1958). "The Expanding Airport". The Office of Charles and Ray Eames.
- ^ Rein, Lisa (26 January 2010). "Passenger train goes into operation Tuesday at Dulles airport". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. Retrieved 4 September 2021.
- ^ "PHL: Passenger Transfer Vehicles Are No Thing of the Past | PHL.org". www.phl.org. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
- ^ JSC Digital Image Collection Archived 2013-02-17 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Hardware Information at NASA Archived 2014-07-14 at the Wayback Machine