FIRST CALL HOBBS WALL

Waiting Room On Wheels

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Most Fiexible Sotution

The Federal Aviation Agency agreed with Saarinen that the mobile lounge appeared the most flexible solution to the growing problem of airport mobility and the ever-growing distances thai passengers are required to walk between most terminal buildings and their aircraft.

Th.e average walk from ticket counter to plane has lengthened at airports throughout the country to a quarter of a mile. This average climbs to half a mile for the passenger who must change planes at any given airport.

Saarinen designed one end of the mobile lounge to seal to the terminal building until passengers are aboard; the other end to mate with the aircraft at door level by means of a unique tele- scoping ramp device that adjusts up, down and sideways to accommodate all jet passenger craft in use today or in the foreseeable future.

F.A.A. officials, who envisioned Dulles International as the world's first jetport designed from the outset to meet the needs of the jet age, estimate that the $5 million cost of the 20 lounges now in service will be defrayed by savings in taxiing that would otherwisc be necessary in guiding jets from terminal to service apron and takeoff runways.

Today's jetliners are the most expensive form of transportation ever, they point out. Taxiing on the ground or idling its engines, a jet burns up $50 or more in fuel per minuts-3n expense that runs into hundreds if not thousands of dollars per taxiing trip at some. airports.

"Loading bridges" were installed several years ago in order to solve the passenger walkathon at Idlewild, O'Hare and Los Angeles International airports. These bridges sheltered passengers while they were boarding their planes, but passengers stiU had to negotiate long distances on foot through the corridors of,.finger" system terminal buildings. And the problem of costly, intricate taxiing of jetliners from landing strip to terminal loading gates remained unsolved.

Drive power for the air-conditioned. radio-controlled mobile lounges at Dulles is supplied by twin l?2-horsepower engines located at each end of the vehicle so that it may Ee driven from either end without being turned around. Prime contractor for the huge mobile lounges, each equivalent in size to eight intercity buses stacked four-on-four, was Chrysler Corporation. The Budd Company, Philadelphia, leading builders of automobile bodies and railway cars, built the bodies under subcontract to Chrysler.