Would it be possible to get towed to the runway  ?

 

Thanks

Usually things get towed off the runway if there is a problem, but it is unlikely you would tow many aircraft to the runway, since if they cannot make it there under their own power, there's really no point in them going there. An exception to that is the following, and that's an interesting story for a couple of reasons....

We did actually tow a Vueling Airbus to the Golf 3 holding point right near runway 23R at EGCC a couple of days ago, and as it turns out we should not have done so! The aircraft was on stand 44L and we had finished loading it but learned it had a much later slot for departure so we were sat in the pushback tug waiting for that, but we told the crew that our shift finished fairly soon and so they'd better think about what they wanted to do and so we in the tug, the Airbus crew and ATC ended up having a minor discussion about it. As luck would have it, the airport wanted that stand clear for another arrival, but did not have another free stand which we could tow the Airbus to, so instead they told us we could tow the aircraft to the Golf 3 holding point and it could wait there for half an hour or so until its departure slot came up. That's quite a long push and tow incidentally and fairly unusual.

As luck would have it, I did actually film it from the cab of the tug and it will be on one of my youtube vids at some point. That's because I'd just headsetted out an Embraer 145 previously, and so I gave another guy on our team the option of headsetting the Vueling or not, but he agreed to do it since I'd done the 145 (it was cold at the time and windy, so nobody was too keen to headset stuff out). As a result, I got to sit in the cab of the tug, so I figured I'd film the push on my phone's camera.

So, since ATC said we could do that tow, we did that tow, but when we got back to the crew room we were told that apparently we are not supposed to tow Airbuses when they have passengers and fuel on board. This is because in the past one of them broke free from the tug owing to the weight of it, and came very close to injuring someone, and so within a few days of that incident Airbus had issued a directive forbidding it. Having never heard of that directive, we went ahead and did the tow not realising we were not supposed to. It went okay, but that rule was news to us!