Originally Posted by
EmbraerFlyer
Another thing I notice about some of the guys that are so conscious about saving 50lbs of fuel to save the company some money is the fact that some of them fail to realize the APU is a turbine engine. I've flown with some captains that turn the APU on when we pull into the gate because they dont want to wait on the ramp agent to plug in the GPU, then they turn it off as soon as we get ground power. The more cycle you put on a turbine engine you reduce the life of that engine. These are the same captains that do a single engine taxi at 83,000lbs and blast everybody behind them with all the extra power needed.
Poor coordination of the airline to have it take more than 30 seconds after coming to a stop to get ground power hooked up.
SWA can do it. Why can't everyone else? Fine if they can't, but expect different actions from the crew (such as starting the APU approaching the gate) because of the inability to get power available to the plane.