If they boarded staring from the rear, this should be mitigated to a large extent.
This seems common sense. Why don’t they do it? There must be a reason.
They could board first and business class and then reverse board.
Most airlines’ boarding strategies are terrible, but getting rid of assigned seats would objectively make my flight experience more chaotic.
Every time I accidentally fly Southwest, I'm horrified at how bad the boarding system is. People plop down wherever leaving one-seat holes so you can't sit with your partner.
It also guarantees more seat trading than an assigned system because most people in the assigned system have seats they wanted. People on Southwest flights are always haggling so they can sit with their partner. I almost never see seat trading on other flights.
My mind is blown. But then again every time I take a Southwest flight, I'm wondering "who tf is this for?" and I've finally found my guy.
You can still pay more for earlier boarding - families with young children board first
Other airlines will gladly assign you a seat for a price
The times I didn't check in early could suck, but I was pretty good at spotting couples that had split aisle-window (leaving the middle seat empty), and then calling their bluff.
But it's been several years since I've flown, and I'm sure all carriers have since innovated new ways of making the experience worse, while charging for the privilege of mitigating it.
And because corralling children (even teenage children!) is much harder than just getting up and walking on yourself, this results in families almost invariably having to either accept being spread across separate seats in multiple rows, or being pushy about trading seats with exactly the kinds of people who have aggressively made sure they get there first.
Still it would have been nice to see a comparison of the times between non-assigned front-to-back boarding and traditional assigned boarding. But I can imagine that's not so amenable to simulation.
I'd also add, I've seen some more sophisticated theoretical boarding strategies, but passengers have trouble even understanding zones, there's no chance of boarding alternate rows or whatever working in practice.
>Loading back to front just moves the line inside the plane, but is not significantly faster than loading from the front to the back.[2]
[1]: https://thepointsguy.com/news/back-to-front-boarding-coronav...
[2]: https://thepointsguy.com/2012/10/travel-science-improving-ai...
https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2016/05/11/resentment-of-...
I remember boarding a Virgin flight in Australia in 2019 and they boarded from both ends of the plane. I thought that was the most efficient way.
Boarding last when you’re in the back is no fun because you’re squeezing past everyone who’s trying to get their carry-on situated, but boarding last in the front seems like a luxury.
Overhead bin space does make sense for why people in economy want to board first. But first/business class typically have their own bins, so why do they want to board first?
There's a whole other class of passengers with status in various forms of economy that, as you say, don't have dedicated overhead so if they wait too long, they can run out too as people start filling in the front storage on their way to further back in the plane.
It makes more sense when thinking of the deboarding logistics to go front to back to ensure those sitting in the front will have overhead space at their seat as intended.
Basically people ruined it.
Seems simple if one cares to admit it: Status.
No judgment here, even though we were in fact in the last category of seven. Not needing extra time for kids/elderly, not premier, not business, not military, not strata du jour...so yes, our category boarded from the back to front! Sort of... :-)
Generally though, I just hate flying and try to avoid it.
But ultimately yeah. That was the full expectation that they wouldn’t care in the slightest.
For bonus points, they have to police the size of carry ons to make sure no one sneaks on to the plane with something that won’t fit under their seat.
Of course, their website obfuscates these terrible policies, so then you get to watch a line of people that look like they want to scream at the poor boarding agents.
The workaround is obvious: always travel with a larger bag, even if it's mostly empty.
I'm always gobsmacked at the obvious class divide during boarding, and the efforts they go to in order to maintain it. The HUGE signs that "PREMIUM" are over here, and everyone else is over there. I also really like those barriers and retractable ropes/fences they put up, and how they try exceptionally hard to stop me sitting remotely close to the 'Premium' boarding area, even just to read a book.
I don't do anything else much in big public gatherings (public transport, sporting events, live music), so I think it's particularly jarring for me.
Think it through. You've just been charged an extra $500 to sit in a chair for four hours, and you're waiting in line behind a mother with five screaming children? You've got very important business things to attend to! Or whatever!
IDK if you ever watched _Veep_ but there's this marvellous episode where a megadonor is complaining that he didn't get more chicken than the $100-plate crowd at a fundraiser. He was literally counting (let's generously say) $5 chicken breasts.
Never mind that he was a hominid of roughly the same proportion as everyone else in the room; did not metabolize food any faster or differently; and certainly couldn't care less about $5.
So: like that, but for air travel.
And this is why I usually wait towards the end of boarding to get on the plane no matter where I'm sitting.
As is commonly the case when one looks at a giant industry and says "I could do this way better having thought about it for 30 seconds" this is a far more difficult problem to optimize than it appears on first glance.
My favorite half-baked + stupid + fun one: Install the plane seating area at the gate itself, as a separate detached entity on a conveyor belt. Passengers can take their time, it's open, there aren't walls. You can just walk right into Row 20, seat A. No squeezing down aisles. Once everyone arrives and takes their seat, the belt moves and shuttles the seats+passengers into the fuselage. Kinda like a mini-roller coaster. Shut doors. Take off. Repeat in reverse after landing.
(There are obviously serious problems with this. You'd have to redesign planes and gates, at a minimum.)
Everyone has a number on their ticket and you form a line.
Of course, some fraction of passengers always ignore this, leading to a certain amount of chaos.
Here's an unethical life pro tip. When I fly for business, I intentionally wait until the final boarding call to get on.
Why?
Because then I would sit where ever I felt like on the plane! Extra leg room aisle rows? You betcha! Since I fly red eyes often, this would sometimes get me 3 seat rows to myself.
One time I got extra bold and just sat in an open first class seat. Managed to go half way before the stewardess said I shouldn't be in first class. She didn't make me leave however and I wasn't drinking their booze.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMgarcFkXz4 (Vox)
tldw: random boarding turns out to be the fastest
Southwest being the fastest also makes sense, as people who can choose their own seats will gravitate to open areas rather than waiting for someone to stow their carry-on so they can sit next to them.
Method two: You start boarding based on your zone number. The people seated in the rear go first.
It sounds like a combination of the two would be even better but it would be hard to manage.
Isn't this how it's done around the world?
(Last piece of the puzzle to solve the biggest issue with boarding, you need dedicated flight attendends who will find a place for your carry on. They sometimes even ask some people to take their smaller items from out of the bin and put them under the seat)
But more importantly, boarding isn't the only action being taken. You can't take off without fuel and luggage, and even food factors into turnarounds.
Ask such people to step out of the aisle for a moment to let others pass, or if that fails, just run'em down.
I think it's an issue of missing arms at the airport or doesn't add that much convenience but it's doable
I’ve lived in the USA for most of my life and I don’t think I’ve ever done back boarding, and have perhaps deplaned from the back once. It’s very rare here.
It’s quite crazy to me that people don’t do back boarding more often, but perhaps the YouTube comment on the CGPGrey video above was telling: a pilot said that boarding isn’t actually the bottleneck, it’s getting everyone’s checked baggage on board. So even after everyone is taking forever to board there’s still more to wait on, so why would airlines even bother to make it faster when it’s not the real bottleneck.
But what they do care is turnaround time, and minimising boarding and deboarding is effective in making it shorter. Whole goal of such airlines is to fit as many flights in regular day as they can. And cutting some minutes or tens of minutes is effective for them.
Of course this won't happen because of all the business travellers.
But I've noticed that lots of time is spent trying to stow carry ons and close overhead bins.
Just ban carry ons and reserve the time for getting people into their seats.
Disclosure: after my last misrouted bag, I have probably checked bags twice since 2011.
It is spent waiting on bags in the terminal.
Solve each problem independently and stop trying to mix them.
Also, we don't have to ban carry ons, we can use Hacker News and Reddit's favorite blunt tool - taxes.
Apply a large add on cost (taxes) for each carry on. The larger and heavier, the more add on paid.
This would also offset the fuel costs of carry ons.
Of course business users could just expense the carry on add on cost, which preserves carry ons for them
Checked luggage are weighed and accounted for at check in.
For passengers - just assume 136 KG (which is really generous) times (the number of seats plus total crew)
I know that I'm a data point of one and am really just unlucky, but regardless, I am quite simply never checking my luggage ever again.
I have to imagine that if carry-ons were banned, and thus the amount of checked baggage increased, more luggage would be lost. Also, more time would presumably be spent waiting on the tarmac while the luggage is loaded, so all this "saved" time would really just amount to more time spent sitting there doing nothing.
So yeah, this suggestion is a hard pass from me.
As I understand it, the right thing to do is go shopping for the clothes you need as soon as your bag is missing, and then request reimbursements for those costs.
This is congruent with how the claim process worked out for me. Although perhaps airlines have been working on weaseling out of their liability in the name of cost cutting.
But I've been checked bag gang for life.
It's so easy to walk around an airport and board a plane without dragging carry ons behind you.
The worst issue I've had, knock on wood, is broken roller bag wheels, but the airlines have always compensated me a new luggage credit.