Originally Posted by lincolnjkc

It's like someone intentionally went out of their way to make it as awful as possible.
- There are two sets of doors leading out to the "fingers" but instead of putting a ticket lift station at each set of doors they put two ticket lift stations on one side and use the other for arriving pax only . It seems like just doing ticket lift on both side would alleviate a lot of the confusion/stress/disorder.
- It's a total crapshoot as to how boarding will be processed -- some will use both ticket lift positions for the same flight, some will dedicate a ticket lift station to a flight while the other is used for a different flight (but of course without any signage this makes things an even bigger mess). Some will board "all" flights using both ticket lift positions [but when they do that they usually negate the benefits by boarding group "1-4 for flight 1234" while boarding group 1 for flight 4567, and preboarding flight 8912].
- Someone with satanic tendencies in ops likes to put 4-6 flights with the same departure time at the same "Axy" gate ... e.g. for the flight that prompted this post, had it been on schedule there would have been 3 flights departing at 10:05 and 2 flights departing at 10:10 out of the A3-series of gates.

I don't mind IAD generally, but I hate the 3rd world country that is the A-gates with a passion; the only thing that makes it less awful is two of my GS shuttle rides have been C/D to A or VV.



Below-the-wing is all Swissport, and the folks who stand out on the fingers to make sure you don't wander onto the wrong flight are definitely contractors.

Based on what I was seeing/hearing there Thursday night/Friday morning. (and the supervisor I pulled aside's ID badge) I'm pretty sure the agents in the terminal are all UA employees, but really far down the seniority list.