Thought I would update everybody on my experiences over the weekend at IAD obtaining a gate pass. We were meeting a woman from a small African country who flew to the US to have some delicate surgery out on the west coast. She came through it fine, and her recovery is certainly in the "miracle" category.

I suggested to her hosts on the west coast that we obtain gate passes in order to make sure she got on and off her flights without any difficulty. This trip was this woman's first time outside her own country and the first time she has flown.

Her hosts obtained a doctor's note -- handwritten on his prescription form -- recommending that we, by name, be issued gate passes, etc, etc. Her hosts faxed us a copy which we took to the UA counter at IAD and had called UA to put our names in the computer. The guy informed us that only one of us could go to the gate. Not sure who's rule that is, but that was our plan anyway. My wife would go to the gate and I would wait in baggage claim because the woman was carrying back medical supplies in two maximum-size suitcases for the mission hospital where she worked.

My wife did the picture ID thing and the UA guy gave her an oft-Xeroxed TSA gate pass form. He scribbled her name, the flight number, and his signature. Amazingly, she was treated like a flying passenger -- no SSSS, no shoe carnival, no gate-grope, etc. The moat dragoness kept her gate pass at the checkpoint, which was interesting. My now-screened wife had the run of the airside without any gate or boarding pass in hand.

We did the same thing the next morning in reverse when the woman flew home to Africa. This time, South African Airways wasn't going to issue my wife a gate pass until she produced the copy of the doctor's note. The agent's tuned immediately changed and he issued her the same gate pass form, which the moat dragoness again took from my wife right at the checkpoint. The difference was that UA had our names loaded in the computer, but SA's computer was down when we tried to do the same thing with them.

I was prepared to do the Spiff-suggested routine of buying a fully-refundable ticket with a boarding pass if necessary, but things worked OK without resorting to this. I hope we didn't simply have a random success.