Street-legal Planemate

At Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., the airplanes don't taxi up to the gates to be met by a telescoping walkway. Instead, they use a unique vehicle once called a "planemate" (see links) to ferry passengers from the terminal to the plane. I want a planemate that I can drive to work.

These are no ordinary buses like one finds at many airports, and which require an additional mobile staircase to get people into and out of the plane. No, these babies have a pair of stilts in the middle of the vehicle that allow it to be vertically adjusted from ground level to the height of the terminal gate to the door of the aircraft.

And talk about interior space or luggage capacity! They're *enormous.* I mean, you could load an entire 747 with just one or two of these things. A more common name for them is "mobile lounges," because they're so big inside and because in the early days, cocktails were served on the way to the plane. Make one of these street legal, and all those goofs who think they're cool with the bar in the back of their van will have to genuflect when you ride by. And if you find it hard to fit all the groceries in your car, drive one of these and you'd only have to go shopping once in your life!

And what a cool, retro-ugly design it has. Just look at the pictures in the links! Especially the front end! Has there ever been a cooler front end design than that bug-mouth-looking retractable whatever-it-is? Man, I'd be stylin' for sure in one of these.

It would also be totally cool to use the vertical adjustment feature. You could drive down the road with it fully elevated. Then you'd be able to sneer at the piddling SUV drivers with their so-called elevated view of traffic...and yet the entire vehicle would be so high up you wouldn't block the view of anyone behind you, like the SUVs do.

Of course, there are just tons of other things you could do if you could drive one of these. I'll leave some of them for you to imagine.

But wait! Too expensive, you say, to have one of these built for joyriding? Well today's your lucky day, because as a matter of fact, Dulles airport has just embarked upon a major renovation project that will REPLACE THE PLANEMATES with an underground train system! So in a year or two, these beautiful hulking babies are going to be SCRAP. I bet you could pick one up for a song. Then all you'd have to do is get it modified to make it street legal.

One drawback is that the top speed is probably not too impressive. But I'd want to go slow anyway, to make sure everybody else on the road had a good chance to see me up there driving it.