Originally Posted by
.Scott
So they couldn't have simply retracted the jet way to allow the plane to continue through after offloading?
Well, in that particular picture, it looks like it might be possible with that particular airplane parked at that particular gate in that position. It's worth noting that the presence of an airplane in Northwest livery indicates the photo is at least 8 years old. If you look at Chattanooga on Google earth, the more recent satellite imagery shows that the current gate orientations are more or less straight into the terminal and wouldn't be possible to taxi out of. So, we'd be talking about marshaling an aircraft into a position not in compliance with the current gate markings, GSE equipment positioning marking, and estimating ad-hoc by eyeball the parking orientation that would allow; A.) the Jetway to connect to the airplane, and B.) the airplane to taxi out without a push ... none of which the current ground crew has ever done before or even been trained for, nor are there pavement markings to go by. Additionally, if all the parking stands are all now oriented nose-in to the terminal building, there's a pretty good chance that parking obliquely across one would encroach on an adjacent gate. I think that the chances they'd do that are vanishingly small.