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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

I took a RyanAir flight a few months back, and while there were many things to justify their reputation for being super-budget, one thing I did like was that they did boarding from both sides of the plane - They had a ramp at the rear exit as well as the front. It was one of the most convenient deplaning experiences I've had.

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They do that all the time and it's not for passenger convenience: it's to shave minutes off the turnaround time and get more flights per day. They also almost never use an airbridge even in airports where that is standard. That's both for speed (Ryanair's guys on the ground can get the ramp there faster than the airport employees who drive the airbridge) and for cost savings, since airports charge for that service.

Honest question, are they skipping some other steps then? I wouldn't I expect deboarding and boarding to take longer than checks, fuel and cleaning.

Since a lot of Ryanair flights are relatively short hops, that would at least cut down on refueling time, if not just fuel every couple of legs if the economics work out.

Cleaning is definitely sometimes abbreviated, I've been at the stand for a Ryanair flight in Leeds, seen the previous passengers get off, then they boarded us five minutes later (the inbound flight was late, so maybe not standard practice)

Cleaning happens between deboarding and boarding, not in parallel.

Normally there are no particular checks that can't be done from the cockpit at turnaround.

Refuelling takes less time than that typically.

I've only encountered that once in the US but it was great as well -- Southwest at LGB (Long Beach, CA) had a separate set of air-stairs at the back door for boarding. I would guess it's not done more here because there are few airports that both board with stairs on the tarmac rather than a jetbridge, and also have non-regional (737+) jets where it would make sense.

You expect Americans to -gulp- climb stairs???

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