A Dulles International Airport mobile lounge collided with an airline tug vehicle on an airfield surface road Wednesday evening, the second crash involving an airport shuttle this month, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority officials said.
No injuries were reported, and passengers were transferred to another shuttle and taken to the airport concourse, officials said in a statement. The involved shuttle was removed from service and will be inspected.
On Nov. 10, 18 passengers were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries after a shuttle struck a dock when it arrived at Concourse D at about 4:30 p.m., MWAA officials reported.
The elevated, buslike vehicles are a fixture at Dulles, which was designed in the late 1950s and built without any concourses or gates typical of most high-traffic airports. The mobile lounges were designed to ferry as many as 120 riders between the airport terminals and planes.
The shuttles debuted at Dulles in 1962, and other airports around the world began using similar vehicles. But by 2010, Dulles was the only major airport still using the vehicles, as other major airports installed trams and other transportation designs.
Rather than build expensive new infrastructure at Dulles, officials opted for a $16.4 million overhaul of the mobile lounges in 2023. Pennsylvania-based Brookville Equipment is revamping one of each of Dulles’s two types of vehicles: a mobile lounge and a slightly shorter yet heavier version of the vehicle called a Plane Mate.
A full renovation of the fleet could take $143 million over six years. The total fleet consists of 19 mobile lounges and 30 Plane Mates.
Work on those two overhauled vehicles has yet to be completed, Crystal L. Nosal, a spokesperson for MWAA, said earlier this month.
The incidents are under investigation.
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