No matter what you called them, the people-movers at Washington-Dulles are nearly gone. Here’s one in action. When the airport opened in the 60s, the “Toonerville Trollies” would take passengers from the main terminal right out to the plane. That’s service, baby!
There was a problem, though. Dulles was a white elephant for a long time.
Dulles opened in November 1962. At that time if you wanted to fly international from the DC area you had to haul yourself up to Friendship Airport near Baltimore (now BWI). National didn’t have the runway space to handle large jets. Although Dulles’ first international non-stop didn’t happen until 1964 and its first jumbo jet service started in 1970, it was clear the airport was built with expansion and large planes in mind.
Dulles sits about 30 miles from downtown DC. Before the building boom, Chantilly was the boonies. To many people it still is. And people were used to heading to Maryland to take that TWA flight to Paris or Madrid.
You can see how some would consider it an eyesore. It swooped out of the countryside, among the old barns and cows. The designer, Saarinen, wanted it that way. He also wanted mobile lounges.
They served as a portable jet-bridge and kept people out of the rain.
Of course, when jet bridges as we know them came around, it decreased the mobile lounge’s usage.
Things remained quiet at Dulles into the early 70s. My parents would drive out and have dinner there, never worrying about finding parking at the terminal.
But then came the 80s and the Dulles corridor took off like a rocket. Passengers started streaming in and work on a mid-field terminal began. This changed the role of these mobile lounges, which were now used to shuttle people back and forth to the new terminal. Many of the gates in the original airport, where passengers once queued up to go directly to their planes, were re-purposed.
Through the 90s, the airport expansion grew. The main terminal got longer and more parking was added. Now the airport was always packed and busy day and night with an eclectic mix of passengers from foreign airlines and folks taking puddle hoppers to places like State College and Greensboro.
The greatest change was to come. In 2010, the AeroTrain debuted to take passengers out to the mid terminals. As of now, some mobile lounges are still in use, but only to get people to the temporary D terminal.
So now they are the white elephants, and big ones at that.
Well that is very cool indeed and I have never heard of these until now. I assume multiple of these Mobile Lounges are needed to empty a Boeing 747.
My now-wife rode one of these when taking a flight to Moscow (via Frankfurt) on Lufthansa in 1990, the first, and now probably last, time either of us will ever have been in one. (And I did see her off at the gate, another bygone custom. 🙁 )
Since you mentioned FRA: Our high school (Gymnasium) class made a trip to Frankfurt, visiting the Zoo and the Airport. We went on the observation deck and watched the big birds land and take flight. I believe it was after PanAm 104 that the deck was permanently closed.
The mobile lounge is completely new to me. I wonder about the engine and transmission. These things were the size of 8 city buses. Did they use Cummins engines that normally drive earth moving equipment?
These look great fun, but that trermnal building is a stunning piece of architecture!
Eero Saarnien also designed the iconic TWA terminal at JFK – which symbolized flight in motion. I think Jet Blue has preserved several sections of the old TWA terminal.
A unique relic of inefficiency. That a terminal would be built without efficient entry and egress from other portions of the airport is ridiculous. RIP.
I think this was one of the last big airports from the pre-hub era, when the idea was that you’d go to the airport, get on a plane and go somewhere, and not be as likely to change planes. DFW suffered from the same problem–it was set up to allow you to get to your gate quickly if you were just leaving town, but not so much to let you get a connecting flight. There’s no way a new hub would ever be built this way today. (But a beautiful building–it was even more dramatic before NVa was so developed and you’d see it sort of floating out there in the middle of the farmland at night.)
Kansas City International Airport was also built in a similar fashion to DFW (crescent “C” shaped terminals) to minimize a walk from your car to your plane.
Unfortunately it was poorly adapted to hub/spoke flights, and even more so to security checkpoints post-9-11 and TSA era.
Kansas City is a very strange airport. I flew into there in the 90’s and remember the terminals still having a rather dark 70’s vibe to them, plus the three crescent-shaped buildings just struck me as quite odd.
I caught a plane out of KC years ago and was surprised at how efficient the process was. It felt like I hadn’t walked more than 300 feet in a straight line from parking lot to plane.
Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport had these, too, at least the last time I was there in 2000. I don’t recall if they were used universally or only in certain areas, but I found them strange and interesting at the same time. Useful as a stopgap if there’s too much terminal traffic but odd with the advent of the jetway.
I’ve traveled through Dulles a few times and got to ride in the lounges when they were used to connect the terminals. Wasn’t any worse than a train between terminals. Probably more costly to operate. Here is a photo from 2008.
Since I grew up in Suburban Virginia I have many memories of Dulles Airport.
-It was almost built in Burke, VA which is much closer in.
-As it was being built folks said it was “too far away” from DC and that no one would use it…and that was true for many years.
-I attended the dedication in Nov 1962 -I was eleven years old. JFK spoke and I took a snapshot of him with my Kodak Brownie Camera from about 30 feet away. This was just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Scary time and everyone was still on-edge. Only years later did we realize how very, very close we came to all-out nuclear war.
-One year later I stood at the entrance of Arlington Cemetery as his funeral procession passed by. I will never, ever forget the drumbeats and horses footsteps. With thousands of people on that corner that -and soft crying were the only sounds
-When Dulles first opened there was an open-air observation deck below the control tower. In those early days the Mobile Lounges drove slowly and carefully. As time passed they would “hot-rod” across the tarmac!
-Dad worked for the FAA and got us up into the control tower on occasion in the mid 60’s. Not many planes to watch and the panoramic view beyond the airport proper was only the treeline in all directions since this was many years before the development for Reston, Ashburn and Chantilly.
-The only road to Dulles was Route 28 -2 lanes stretching from Route 50 to the south to Route 7 to the north, no crossroads inbetween, no Access Road.
-People would go out to Dulles just to watch the Concorde take off and land. Awesome sight but very noisy. On approach for landing however it was very silent!
-Folks would visit Dulles just to wander the terminal. When international flights would arrive or depart it was fun to watch the people, hear foreign languages and see airliners from other countries.
Animated film by the great Charles and Ray Eames:
A very interesting film. I had no idea that the Eames did this kind of work.
Thank you for posting this.
Sure, the Eameses did a lot of this kind of work. Their corporate work, especially for IBM, which included films and exhibit design, is very well-known. They designed the exhibits and multi-screen presentation for the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair which was designed by Eero Saarinen, the designer of Dulles Airport.
Mustn’t forget Paul Rand’s groundbreaking work for IBM. But I agree totally on the legacy and output of Charles and Ray Eames. Graphic designers, furniture designers, toy designers, film makers and creators of Billy Wilder’s home. I’m lucky enough to have a high-back Aluminium Chair, albeit with sagging naugahyde
The Eames film does a good job of explaining the design goals of Dulles, but it avoids mentioning the obvious ancestor of this concept. Look no further than D.C.’s Union Station for the proof: passengers enter on the wide side of a vaulted hall, and are sorted into small waiting rooms to enter narrow conveyances on parallel tracks. They’ve built a train station that uses buses to reach the planes! Talk about “multi-modal”…
I went through here in 1992 on the way to DC, but I don’t recall riding in these
My mistake it was reagan
Very interesting vehicle! Kind of like the precursor to the Cadillac Escalade (minus the chrome).
I also enjoyed your brief history of Dulles. I’ve never been there, as every time I’ve gone to or stopped over in D.C., I’ve flown in and out of Reagan National.
Thanks! Reagan is much easier to access from DC itself, thanks to Metro. It will reach Dulles in another few years. I hope.
I’ve been flying non-stop to Dulles from LAX for years and using Metro to the city. There was a very efficient Washington Flyer bus between Dulles and West Falls Church Metro station. Now that the Silver Line to Dulles is nearly finished, the Washington Flyer connection is even quicker – to Wiehle-Reston East Metro station from Dulles. I think the opening of the final, direct connection of Metro to Dulles is only months away.
Have used dozens of these mobile lounges over the years and always found them quick and efficient. Unfortunately accessing the new airport train to terminals involves great distances of walking and moving walkways.
Unfortunately, the “fast” bus from IAD to metro is now replaced by a shorter bus ride to the end of the Silver line, which results in a much longer trip to get into the district itself. Advertised as an improvement, it is a great detriment. Once the airport authority extends the silver line through IAD and beyond, it will be even worse (least of which is because to save money, they will have the train station something like 1/3 mile from the terminal – although the airport authority could have created the path for the train when doing major construction less than a decade ago, it did not, requiring further money to be wasted to force it into the area)..
IAD was designed and billed as a method to improve the passenger experience. I can tell you (as a 16+ year DC area resident frequent traveler) that all the money poured in consistently decreases the passenger experience, requiring longer distances to traverse, and greater inefficiencies. Eero is turning over in his grave how his vision has been mangled.
I think I remember riding one of these when we flew to Europe from JFK. It was my !st flight, and I thought this was the plane.
I had a similar experience at JFK in 1972, I knew it was not the plane because I had just landed, so I thought (I wished!) I was inside one of these
Nice one Lynne.
Airports are losing that magical aura. JFK’s Terminal 6 by IM Pei with its hanging glass curtains and the circular PanAm terminal (which I just found when searching for images) have both been victims of the progress of time. There is something monumental about these structures, both in scale and ambition but there is no denying that practicality is of paramount importance. Nothing worse than an inefficient airport.
The Saarinen TWA terminal had been lodged in my psyche for a very long time as one of the most beautiful and compelling structures ever built, but it is now redundant. Even as a museum or theme restaurant it would lose its immediacy. Sigh.
I’d call the tented fabric roof of Denver International Airport pretty magical.
That’s nice. Melbourne’s Tullamarine is an exceedingly ugly accretion of sub-malls, but it was never pretty in the first place. Says something about the design when the crappy hotel across the way dominates the view.
I never knew Dulles had these. Saint Louis also used them. I don’t know if they were originally used for loading planes ,but by the early 90s when I experienced them they were a way to get from one terminal to another on TWA (later American)
Pretty cool but as mentioned above, inefficient, especially when you’re running for your connection…
In addition to ferrying passengers from the main terminal to Terminal D. They also use the mobile lounges to carry arriving international passengers directly to customs. This is the only time the lounge still goes directly to the plane. Took quite a few of them to unload my Air France A380 last year
I rode in these back I the late nienties during a business trip to Virginia. While I found it an interesting approach to people moving, the interior air reeked of diesel exhaust. I don’t know if the smell came from the people mover’s engine, or the adjacent jets, but I found the smell overpowering.
You’ll notice the units in the pictures have tall stack assemblies on the top of the cab- A local told me they were exhaust stacks designed to improve the interior air quality. Since one of the black and white pictures show a mover without the stack, I’m inclined to believe them. While the mover I rode in included two stacks, it still STUNK inside.
I don’t think those pylons on top are exhaust stacks. Look at the first picture where the cabin is raised up on stilts. When the cabin is lowered back down, I’m pretty sure that those stilts are inside the pylons.
The one without the pylons appears to be an older model.
That would be one dirty engine to require four exhaust stacks. Even ocean liners had fewer!
I was going to comment on the fumes too. I’ve been using Dulles for about 30 years now (geez) and now live 10 minutes from the terminal and well within the landing path and there are a few strong memories I have of Dulles from growing up:
#1 is the diesel fumes in these things (never knew they were called lounges though)
#2 is the voice announcing gate arrivals and departures apparently the same since it opened – though gone now
#3 walking along the hall in the basement to get to the shorter trip planes that you walked onto the tarmac to board, also long gone.
Yea but what about their 0 – 60 times and what can they do in the slalom?
Nice bit of history about an airport that I grew up with. The vast majority of the flights that I have taken while growing up and living in the Washington area have been through Dulles, and I remember well how quiet and often eerily empty it was during the 1970s and how it became dramatically busier during the 1980s and onward. The sound of the automated voice that announced flights and “ground transportation to Washington National Airport” until the 1990s was burned into my long-term memory during that time.
Regarding the mobile lounges, I would like to add the observation (made while staring at the manufacturer’s data plates during many rides) that most if not all of them were made in the early 1960s, by Chrysler Corporation together with Budd Company, the latter presumably as the coachbuilder for the bodies. My guess is that the drivetrain used some sort of Chrysler V8, geared very high numerically to propel these heavy vehicles up to their 25 mph top speed.
They were prominently featured, along with Airtemp air conditioners, tanks, boats and outboard motors, and Saturn V boosters in the “Diversified Products” section of Chrysler’s mid-60s annual reports.
Never rode them as originally intended at Dulles, only as shuttles to the mid-field terminal, but I did ride them to the plane at JFK a few times. They seem to be out of service now.
In Arthur Hailey’s Airport, the Airport Manager (played by Burt Lancaster in the movie) calls Dulles a “dead end” of airport planning. it’s interesting that Saarinen’s contemporaneous TWA terminal used a more conventional bridge and satellite plan.
I think I rode on one of these, on one of those rare times that I’ve been traveling on business. I remember there was construction and I had to take some kind of people mover to get to a terminal, and “Terminal D” sounds very familiar.
I rode on one of these in ’96 and remember thinking it felt pretty archaic and seemed to take f o r e v e r to get to the terminal. The last thing you want after a long transatlantic flight is to continue to be confined in yet another metal tube…The trains that are in most airports now are bad enough, this though was not any better. Give me the European outlying terminal system of climbing down the stairs onto the runway/tarmac and then getting into one of those extra-wide low-rider buses any day.
Even though I rarely use Dulles these days, there’s something about this font that just screams “home” to me.
Another factor in the passenger decline at Dulles is Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport, about two hours south. It feeds you to hubs on RJ’s, 717s and every kind of Dash 8 imaginable (love them, seriously). Prices are very competitive with Dulles.
I like the Dash 80 also…great sounds and motion! But only on a real short hop, like SEA-YVR.
Difficult to imagine the boarding process with the people mover, passengers angling to get that all important overhead space. Not pretty…
Charlottesville-Albe.’s sassy line-up.
With my working life hat on, the Dash 8 Q400 is not an easy aircraft to provide component support services for, to say the least……
How about “the cruise ship boarding ramps of the Passenger Ship Terminal” in Manhattan? Dockside classic.
rode on these many times at Dulles throughout the 90s and 2000’s. I always found it amusing when you were welcomed by the recorded message onto the “mobile lounge”. These were specialized (and i’m sure very pricey) buses and if you weren’t seated (as was often the case) you’d better have a grip on something or you would go flying. It was never a good way to start or end a flight.
The only place I’ve seen those mobile lounges was at Montreal’s Mirabel Airport. This was also built far out of town and opened in 1975. Unlike Dulles, it was never a success – after many years as Montreal’s international airport it was downgraded to cargo, and the terminal is now being demolished.
Charles deGaulle Airport also used mobile lounges, at least until the early 2000s. It was basically like riding in a double wide bus that could be jacked up.
I rode in one of these.
I’ve only been to USA once, and it was in autumn of 2000. The destination was Washingtion DC and of course my flight from Europe landed on Dulles airport. We were taken from the plane to the terminal (and in opposite direction a week later, on the return flight) in these ‘mobile lounges’ – definitely an interesting and unique way to get off an on the plane…
@Dave Skinner: I do not recall any diesel smell when riding in these, but it was almost 15 years ago, one forgets.
And anyway, while there’s always the smell of jet fuel exhaust on airports when you’re on the apron, around the actual planes, that smell is very distinctive and quite different from the smell of diesel exhaust.
Which brings me to another memory: the first time I smelled jet exhaust, which was in the summer of 1991, during the War of independence in Slovenia when one day, a Yugoslav Air Force MiG-29 made a low level pass over our neighborhood, directly over our house…
In February, 1983, I was on my way to Omaha for a job interview. Arriving at the gate at Lambert-St. Louis, we boarded one of these mobile lounges and started moving out to where the plane was – somewhere along the east terminal – I don’t recall, but due to the length of the ride, one passenger cracked “Looks like we’re driving to Omaha”!
I found these interesting, and I think it was the only time I rode one of these.
I didn’t take the job, FWIW…
I began my airline career at Ozark Air Lines in early 1978, and following the accelerated growth that began with de-regulation in December of that year we began to run out of space on our one concourse (C) at Lambert St. Louis International Airport. We began to use to “gates” on the “J Dock” prior to construction of the D concourse and used these transporters. It was a real pain for a lot of reasons (literally in some cases as crewmembers were supposed to be on board the aircraft prior to the transporter arriving, however no shuttle service was provided until one pilot was hit by a fuel truck while walking across the ramp).
What I found particularly ironic was the fact that there were no seat assignments for through flights so experienced passengers would gather in front of the jetway doors at normal gates in order to get the best choice of seats (much like I see at Southwest gates) but this backfired when using the transporters as first on translated to last off when it came time to board the plane.
As far as I know, Trudeau airport in Montreal still uses these. I last flew out of there in the summer of 2013, and they were still using them at that time.
I believe CC’s own late Kevin Martin helped design the people mover, that is replacing these, at Dulles.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/washington-dulles-international-airport-birth-of-an-apm/
I remember these as a passenger and what I remember is not pleasant.
My memory comes up with these adjectives to describe the customer experience:
loud; disconcerting; hot; slow
I’ve only flown through Dulles once, back in 2001 on my way to Italy. Much as stated in the article, I flew a “puddle jumper” from Greensboro, connected through Dulles on my way to JFK and then to Rome. Smallest damn plane I’ve ever ridden on and I’ve intensely disliked anything propeller-driven ever since. [Lest you think these are the only planes out of GSO, it actually has the runway length to do International flights, though I don’t know if any regularly service the place.] We were on something bigger from Dulles to JFK, maybe a 737? But I did have to ride one of the mobile lounges between terminals. It was an odd experience!
Funny to think these used to ferry you directly to the plane before the advent of jetways directly from the terminal–though that makes their existence much more justifiable. While they weren’t the most pleasant things to ride, once they’re all gone that will be one more location-distinctive piece of air travel homogenized.
Hmm, the MWAA sells their airport surplus on govdeals. Someday you can probably buy one of these at auction.
Those things would make a hell of a deer stand/camper.
Found a great old Chrysler ad for these things…..
All international passengers at Dulles are brought into these contraptions and then shuttled over to the passport/immigration entry hall. There’s a new fleet of stainless sided lounges, so I’m not so sure that they’re going completely away. Just rode one on Jan. 3rd on arrival from Frankfurt.
Can we complain about the new ‘automated kiosk’ and the hour and forty minute wait there? Nah, why mention that the US has taken the Italian approach to ‘automation’ —
use technology to add a cumbersome and confusing new step in a well-worn manual process, then demand that the receipt from the new automated step be inspected and stamped by the same manual process that used to rule….(sorry, the exasperation of the experience is still grinding…)
I was a passenger at Dulles 6 years ago, which was a memorable experience because I’d always wanted to see the architecture. It’s one of the most stunning structures I’ve ever seen! I did ride on a Mobile Lounge that took us between the original Saarinen terminal and a newer one. What a bizarre experience. The “docking” sequence reminded me of a science-fiction movie. It was weird and a bit unpleasant for the reasons stated above, but I still hate to hear that they’re disappearing. I took a couple of photos.
Here’s an interior view I snapped on the ride.
My Dad represented the Budd C.’s installation of Dulles mobile lounges in 1962. He supervised the installation of Budd’s DRCs (Diesel Rail Cars) throughout the world. He owned a TR-3 at that time which he said he raced on the runways (of course before the opening). What I remember is the red carpet. He must have loved it too because he brought home scraps which he had bounded and was displayed in our living room. (He grew up during the Great Depression so you never wasted anything!)
When I worked for Chrysler in SE Michigan in the early 70s, I heard stories about the mobile lounges that they had designed and built. One engineer claimed that they had mileages that exceeded 100,000, all on the tarmac.
I grew up in Alexandria Va, and you are right about the loneliness of Dulles in the early 60s, and years beyond that. The main terminal was so empty, you could go bowling. Also, I once watched a pilot practice touch-and-go landings in a 707. Nothing much else was happening out there.
Another interesting sidelight…Chantilly is right in Civil War country, and a lot of the visiting engineers from Michigan got immersed in all the battle history. (Back then, you hardly heard anything re the Civil War in Michigan, although one of the top historians, Bruce Catton, was from there).
Just rode one last week! They’re diesel electric which is pretty cool. Cummins 8.3 for propulsion and Cummins 4BT for lounge power.