Cruising around Dulles

One of my pet peeves with Washington DC’s Dulles airport – IAD (which has been obviously designed by a group of Kindergartners for their graduation project) has been their people movers called ‘mobile lounges’ that they use to lug people between terminals. While they finally added a train, you still need to use the mobile lounges to go between the terminal D and most other sections of the airport. These mobile lounges are really overgrown diesel buses that are driven by humans between the terminals. Calling them ‘lounges’ is just a weak attempt to make them sound cool. Pretty much the same way airlines call their clubs ‘lounges’ and make us feel that they are havens of luxury.

On a side note, the mobile lounges are also used at Dulles airport to move some arriving international passengers from aircraft directly to immigration, in cases where the gates do not have an isolation corridor to redirect passengers to the immigration area.

The only good part of these buses is that they have large windows and make their way past multiple gates and taxiways as they go about the airport. I actually look forward to riding them when I have a flight from the D Terminal. I have taken some beautiful pictures on these rides, seeing virtually every kind of aircraft from almost every airline that comes to IAD.

Here are a few:

 

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