Have gone through the former NWA bases several times on the last few trips. Today we had to wait because "it's a long way from the break room". Just what does the in-range do anyway?

My personal theory is the IAM is trying to make a stink. I've seen two different push crews walk off the job right when we get clearance to push. So far, not impressed at all with the professionalism by the ramp operation at DTW or MSP.

Note the incident, and write it up. IAM is giving all the hard working MN men and women a bad name.

Will do. Suspect the CA will as well.

I'd buy the IAM BS theory...total conjecture here, but it seems like maybe the PMDAL jets are getting worse treatment than the PMNWA jets in DTW. On the 75 I haven't had any trouble with the ground crews in DTW lately. (Maybe they can't tell the difference between the 75 fleets?) Of course my sample size is pretty small... seems like all my trips only begin and end in DTW. I spend more time in ATL than DTW these days

The CA I just flew with and the head LCA in LA documented the whole thing and sent SD an e-mail.

I'll betcha that if given an option, guys would buy their own... I know I would...

What's with the 320's not doing single engine taxi? I followed one of ours for 53 minutes this morning in the ATL elephant walk while he burned a couple thousand pounds of fuel.

What always strikes me, as I transit DTW, is that if they're trying to make a point for their union...they're failing miserably.

It's just part of a culture change/meld and years of misinformation and over-restrictive weight limitations for SE taxi.

I'm seeing more than I used to SE taxi, though.

80 is correct. There is another thread devoted to this subject. We just had a 320 LCA who frequents this board spend a month collecting SE Taxi data to present to the fleet. If you want to see a summary visit the Flt Ops A320 Fly By Wire page.

I just finished a 4 day and got the CA to SE taxi almost every leg. An exception was a 5 min taxi in JFK(of all places) off Gate 1 to 31L @ KK. We needed 5 minutes since it was first flight of the day and we actually had to wait 2:30 before we started to taxi. Guys are getting better.

One thing that needs to be changed is our Vol 1 prohibits X-Bleed starts with the parking brake OFF. It must be set in order to do a X-Bleed start, so if we want to SE Taxi we have to keep the APU running. That needs to be changed.