Optimal boarding method for airline passengers (2008)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
That video was where I learned about this paper and the impetus for submitting this story.
Any method that starts separating a parent from their 7&9 year olds is a non starter. Even telling a married couple they can't stand in line together for 20 minutes is going to be unpopular and lead to people breaking the system.
Separately, I have done a lot of flying for business, and I've lost count of how many times I've seen people put their bags in an overhead compartment several rows in front of their assigned seat. The best way to speed up boarding would be to eliminate the overhead compartment entirely. But I don't expect that ever to happen.
I feel like the incentives are backwards, or not aligned. Airlines are starting to charge for checked baggage, when the overhead compartment is the more valuable asset.
They should charge for the overhead space, you get a tag that can be clearly seen from the aisle.
Edit: Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12439465
Every checked in baggage means less cargo on the plane, which is lost money for the airline.
Carry-on has costs that fall mostly on the passengers as a collective. Even the stop time of the plane is shared with other procedures, and more often than not boarding is not the bottleneck.
So a clear win for the passenger is to be had that may not increase plane turnaround but still adds value to the flight experience.
This lack of consideration of the customer experience is why you feel like a potato being hauled around when you fly a plane in anything other than business class.
The first airline that figures out that the customer experience is part of what they are selling and thus should be optimized for is going to make a lot of money even as they manage to charge only a bit more than the average. People will line up to fly them for a more pleasant experience that doesn't require making the seats wider, the plane heavier, or carrying fewer passengers per flight.
Are they? Time and time again low cost companies (what's a codename form the hauling potatoes ones) are successful, every place they offer their services.
I suspect you are wrong on this one.
This is a pure lateral move that can be cost neutral in terms of ticket prices, but would improve the customer experience.
I’ve heard airline folk refer to passengers as “self-loading cargo”. Thats complete dehumanization, and it shows in their products.
I haven't booked tickets in large groups, but usually when I fly with family, we're all on the same record and in the same row, so we could get lumped into the same group and optimize our row individually.
There are several things to improve: 1. it would be good to inform about the need to check luggage before walking through the whole airport or at least giving that option, it’s very annoying to carry luggage around only for it to be checked in at the last moment. 2. incentives would be nice, eg if a flight is fully booked, why not add a small amount of extra weight if you volunteer to check in the hand luggage. 3. primarily check in those who also have checked in luggage. I’ve often been on flights where they check in the hand luggage of some people, then you end up waiting with many others who took the hand luggage on board and are waiting for checked luggage. 4. Let people upgrade for a small fee last minute, say 5-10$ to avoid checking in, but only as a last measure.
Once the luggage is dealt with I don’t see why anyone would care - I’d prefer boarding last in that case.
Here's a case: Say you have a flight booked at 125/120 seats, there's 80 spots overhead: - expect 5 not to come (120 left) - 25 have booked checked luggage, offer them to hand in their carry on (95 left) - for the remaining 15 until enough people take the offer: offer a higher quota when they check in their hand luggage, e.g. 12kg instead of 8kgs as long as the luggage is the same size - if anything remains only then use the old system
pretty sure this would be popular, it's less unfair/annoying and takes care of issues in advance at a fairly low cost (of the 15 getting extra weight, not all of these would actually pay for more luggage or even bring more, by not taking more or putting heavy items in jackets etc.)
Maybe it’s just very polarizing, and SWA “gets away with it” because their market share roughly represents the percentage of travelers who like that method?
What matters more to me? Being comfortable for the 2-5 hours I'm in the air, or shaving 10 minutes off of the time it takes to get on and off of the plane? It's a no brainer.
I ABSOLUTELY realize that in the grand scheme of things, this is an incredibly minor issue. There are much bigger problems in the world. But if I'm going to be flying a lot, as I have during certain career phases, every little thing that makes it a little more comfortable or less stressful does make a difference. And for me, the Southwest seating/boarding system adds stress.
Something we failed to shuck when we came down from the trees, I guess, to paraphrase Heinlein.
It's sort of crazy how often this comes back up again and again once you notice this. Behaviors while driving are another big one.
Another one is lane filtering (sometimes incorrectly known as lane splitting). I am not talking about zooming past everyone at double the speed but the practice of motorcycles riding between cars to the head of the column at stop lights and the practice of motorcycles riding between cars when the cars are moving slowly due to traffic. Legal lane splitting in states like CA limits your speed difference to 15 mph above the average speed of the cars and research unequivocally shows that this practice results in fewer accidents (bikes often times get rear ended at lights due to cars not seeing them so being between cars is a huge safety boost), and good for traffic (bikes not taking up a spot that a car could occupy). Yet people get supremely annoyed at this because they think the riders are somehow cheating.
I recently had a flight that had some backwards seats. My seat was one. First class.
I had read for many years that this was the best for passengers but consumers wouldn't accept it. I had always thought that was a bad assumption probably based on some tiny focus group that nobody ever questioned, and look at that, I didn't have a problem with it.
It's only best for when you crash.
When you're not crashing (most of the time) most people find it quite a bit less pleasant as it means you're facing down when the aircraft climbs and descends. I'd avoid it pretty strongly when booking seats.
It used to be much more common. They seem to have done away with it - I guess based on customer response not just randomly.
You can't now because it's mostly gone, but you used to be able to see when booking a seat that all the forward-facing ones were booked before anyone booked a single rearward-facing one.
And for example - United Polaris. Replaced a 50/50 forwards-backwards configuration they'd had standard for decades with the overlapping forward-only style almost everyone seems to use now.
I associate forward-backward with crusty old 747s and military transport and I think that's how much consumers see it as well - old-fashioned but practical if your passengers are cargo, and certainly not refined or modern.
Removing even a single row of seats is probably worse for airline economics than the amount by which it would speed boarding or add flexibility. (US law also prohibits car seats from being installed in rear-facing seats in aircraft; that law I think is a slight detriment to safety, but it is the law.)
There is a design where the middle seat is further back than the aisle and window seats. It would help in a different way...it's easier to get in and out of the seats. There's even an option to slide the aisle seat in during boarding, though I'm somewhat skeptical about that.
It does make the middle seat more desirable than it currently is, by making it wider and solving the armrest problem. https://www.fastcompany.com/3067612/this-redesigned-airplane...
If you look at the sibling comment’s video, you can see that the pelvis of humans seated back-to-back is farther apart than what you can achieve in today’s all forward-facing seating.
People are willing to some extent to nest feet with people they know but probably don’t want to sit 90° upright for over an hour.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_VC10#Military_service
Why's that?
People will queue just because other people are queuing, to no concrete end, and we wonder why democracy keeps throwing up such bad eggs
Additionally, less risk of loss, too: obviously not all bags make it.
Also, if you are at the back of the queue, there is occasionally a risk of there no longer being space in the overhead compartment for your stuff.
Overhead space is more of an issue, but quite a rare one