Originally Posted by
walkers
Thought of this one while waiting to fly out of Boston the day it opened after the big storms early Feb. Boston had managed to get 2 runways open (which was impressive) - but all the taxiways were still slushy and you couldn't see any of the yellow lines to follow. There also seemed to be a shortage of signallers (the people with the red sticks who help you 'park' - not sure what they're called sorry!)
I was sat watching for quite a while and saw a fair bit of aircraft movement and noticed that every plane that came to 'park' had to wait until the 'signallers' arrived (sometimes a few minutes) before they could pull into the gate.
1) is it mandated that the people signalling you into the gate are there?
2) How helpful are those yellow lines in reality (ie could you do it without the signalling people)
3) Slightly tongue-in-cheek question - do the UA pilots on here think they could park the aircraft without either yellow lines or signallers?!
Also - how much does the slushy ground affect your taxiing?
Cheers
Walkers
1) Yes, by our rules we need a marshaller and wing walker.
2) Not sure which one you're talking about, the parking line or the taxi line. Both are useful and serve a purpose. We need the line or marshaller to come into the gate at the right spot unless we have an electronic parking system, which we do have at a lot of the big hubs. There the marshaller just controls the lights on the electronic board. We control our left and right and he tells us when to slow and stop. The stop marks on the ground are below us, so without a marshaler or electronic board we really wouldn't know where to stop for the jetway.
For taxiways, the line isn't as important. We often taxi in the snow where we can't see them, we just go between the taxi lights, but it is more time consuming and dangerous, so we tend to taxi a lot slower.
3)See above answer. I could park without them as far as lining up, but knowing where to stop would be tough.
Slushy ground taxiing is like driving a car. You taxi slower due to the propensity to slide during turns and longer stopping distances when applying the brakes. We also will taxi with flaps up for takeoff when taxiing through the slush, so that slows down our takeoff checklists until we get down to the runway.
AD