Sunday night at IAD (march 6th 2011)
 

Any of you guys that fly the United Express routes got stuck at IAD last night.? Some poor pilots at ASA, Colgan, Mesa and WaterSki got stuck for over 2 hours (After boarding) because it seems to me that the rampers were missing that night. All I could here on the radio chatter was somthing like

Jetlink 7540: "Ops this is 7540 to Rochester where are the rampers?"

AWAC ops "They are comning"

Jetlink 7540 "Yeah well we have been waiting for over 40 minutes"

or things like

Ops this is ACEY 7050 to Portland if we don't get pushed within the hour we are going to have to cancel due to duty time"

"Ops this is 7540 again WE have some VERy ****ed off Passengers that are wondering why we were not pushed"

Ops this is Colgan 6870 where is the deiceing crew

As for me I was on N501MJ call sign: "Mesa MX 501" that was parked at A2A. We needed to get pushed as well. It took a while for us too.

So for all those guys that had to deal with angry passengers, you have my sympathies.:)

Yikes...! We had them disappear on us during a shift change...Nothing as extreme as that!

SOP at Dulles

By chance was there a "rumor" of lightning in the area --- then again, their ops people would have been the ones to have them vacate the ramp. I got stuck out there a couple of times when someone, somewhere, at sometime, saw, was told, or actually knew there was a lightning strike within 10 miles of the airport.

I was on the Rochester flight and it was completely ridiculous. On top of just waiting for push back for an hour, we had to wait to deice for an hour. When we got deiced, one of the trucks broke down. It was almost 2.5 hours before we got off the ground and it was all because of the ramp crew.

Air Wisconsin ramp rats at their best!

Thats normal for IAD. That has happened to me before, but not that bad. Air Wisconsin needs to go. Their service is absolutely terrible. The worst ground handling I have ever seen. Our performance continually suffers because of their laziness and lack of professionalism and basically not caring at all. It ****es me off that they are making our performance numbers and our airlines look bad. That crap ****es off the passengers and then they don't come back and we suffer because of it. This of course is not a bash on Air Wisky pilots at all, just their crappy rampers at IAD.

You can gauge the meltdown-level inside the A-gates by the comments the pax make as they get on the airplane. "What a cluster ----" "I can't understand a thing any of those people were saying" etc etc...

I saw a gate agent there yell/scream at a passenger 2 days ago who was talking to her while she was boarding a flight...I'd never seen anything like it.

Were you the PIC or the FO? For I heard the Captain on the radio and he and other pilots had alot to say about AWAC operations.
It took us 6 hours for us to get pushed back. But since we were Maintainence we were low priority.

And I hardly saw Any rampers out their that night. They all tried to avoid anybody including me


E.G "Don;t bother me, I am busy etc"

I was jumpseating. I live in Roc and fly for 9L. I was in the back with all the happy passengers. An XJ captain was in the cockpit j/s, he's the person I really feel sorry for as he was in that incredibly uncomfortable seat for about four hours total.