Plain Pull

Dulles Airport has been sponsoring a plane pull for around 15 years. This sounds cool, and it sorta is, and it sorta isn't.

Here's the idea. A company sends twenty people to pull a plane. The plane, this year, is a FedEx plane. Now, you wonder, if you're pulling a plane, how does it get back to its original spot? After all, many, many teams will try to move it? Perhaps each team moves it alternately forward and then backward? Perhaps they slowly move it down a runway?

Ah, the answer is that a machine pulls the plane back to its original spot.

Now I had expected the plane pull to actually be pulled some distance, say, 50 feet or 100 feet. Something that would take at least a minute to accomplish. But with 30 companies, many sporting half a dozen teams, something that long would not only be tiring and time-consuming, it would probably create some logistical issues.

So you only pull the plane for about 10 seconds, which is maybe twenty feet or less, maybe even ten feet.

Why pull a plane? Other than the obvious--to raise money for charity, it's because you can. You can tell folks that you pulled a plane.

Of course, any time there's a competition, there's people trying to win the competition. The key to winning is typically sheer weight. When you get a bunch of folks that's two hundred pounds or more, well, that probably has some advantage. Last year, the top three winners where sheriff's offices.

They don't apparently try to take weight into account. After all, that would involve formulas, and sheriff's offices would be unhappy. The formula could be tweaked in a way that anyone could win. You could, for example, divide time by total weight. This would favor light, strong teams. But would it be fair? So ultimately, they stay with something that is patently unfair, because they can't think of anything else.

Oh did I mention that yesterday was freaking hot?

The good news, and I have to credit the plane pull folks for this, is that they did have food and water and did not inflate the prices like crazy. Water was a dollar, which is about what you'd get in a vending machine. Food was around two dollars to three dollars. Overall, pretty nice.

The parking was a small pain.

And the directions to and from Dulles? Horrid. Just horrid.

There are ramps with no obvious signs right on the ramp. There are so many ways directions could be improved, and yet, people don't even bother.

So when someone asked what I did this weekend?

I pulled a plane.

For ten seconds.