Dave Phillips wrote:Sad thing is that they probably had to pay the FBO for the platinum service.
One of our favourite, circular discussions is at Middle Eastern airports who insist on a pushback (they don’t have the equipment for a Diamond and quite often you can turn on a stand designed for A380s), charging $100 for the privilege. Once over that hurdle, you then get ATC insisting on start before the 15ft ‘manual’ pushback, which was the $100 compromise.
I’ve seen all sorts of ramp job creation schemes, normally initiated with a “Good afternoon captain, how will you be paying?”
We go to lots of places where pushback is mandatory but is actually not needed.
At one the ground crew were very clearly expecting a 'gift' before getting to work but they'd peesed us off on the inbound leg so we were inclined not to play along. It turned into a Mexican stand off with them upping the ante by going to lunch .
What they didn't know was that my oppo spent his formative years as a rampie at Heathrow (you wouldn't get that in an airline). As soon as the ramp bandits were out of sight he jumped in to the tug, fired it up and sped over to our stand where I was ready, towbar connected to the nosewheel. We pushed back, disconnected the towbar and my mate parked up the tug while I called for start clearance.
Someone must have tipped them off as they appeared just in time to see us taxi away. We pointedly ignored the frantic calls from the handling agent on Comm #2. The next time we were there (a year later) we had a new aircraft so our tyres remained un-slashed.
While you might think that I couldn't possibly comment.