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Comment by TheFuture | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is completely dumb and impractical, but could there be a way to remove the seats from the plane, individually or in groups, maybe on a track (overhead?) like a roller coaster, so that there could be a large boarding area with plenty of room for people to get situated. Then once everyone is in their seat, the seats would roll and lock into position.

This would also allow you to quickly deplane, but have the next group of passengers already seated, ready to slide into the plane.

The boarding problem is human, and also spacial. And you can't really get rid of the humans, but you could change the space.

Freight transport has been containerized, how can we do it to passenger transport?

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I discussed this some years ago with an airline engineer. There are many, many practical problems. A pressurized fuselage with a separable section big enough to load passengers on and off is one of the simpler problems. I was left with the impression that it will never[#] happen.

[#] "Never" is a long time. Certainly "not soon"

I was thinking weight would be the biggest problem. Maybe with new materials its not a problem.

We have these automated warehouses and factory floors with robotic carts that can precisely navigate, pickup and deliver loads without a lot of infrastructure needed, that's kinda where I'm coming from.

I'm thinking the solution would have to work with the existing sized doorways for it to be adopted.

The real alternative is to have a mock seating area with ov erhead bins. Everyone gets settled, the the bins are loaded and locked into place, and the passengers walk on without hand luggage. They then know where to sit, and don't spend time futzing with the bags and bins.

Well, you could do it like the cargo version of the 747: fold up the nose and load stuff straight in from the front. (Of course this requires having an upper flight deck like on the 747.

Realistically, there's lots of ways to handle the boarding/alighting process better, but we're talking massive extra expense in new planes and airport modifications in order to shave ten or fifteen minutes off the turnaround time. Probably not even that much, since passenger loading and unloading generally isn't the rate-limiting step.

Everybody has opinions on how airline travel can be improved, because airline travel provides people with many hours of downtime with nothing better to do than to think about how their experience could be improved. (This is also the reason there are so many stand-up comedy bits about airline travel.) It's probably much more profitable to think up ways to improve processes which most people don't see regularly, like... I dunno, concrete pouring or tree felling or fiberglass bending or... other things which don't spring immediately into my mind because I can't see them out the window thus demonstrating how obscure they are.

> Freight transport has been containerized, how can we do it to passenger transport?

A good first step would be to get back to having the a majority travelers check their luggage. A lot of the delay is by everyone bringing overflowing carry on luggage when the planes don't have room for every one do so.

A behavior that the airlines must endorse since it's encouraged by their fee structure.

More impractical than dumb, I think.

The machinery to get the seats in/out will be heavy, mechanically complex. This eats into revenue. Might not even work with existing airplanes.

You'd need to have machinery in the boarding lounge - at every airport the plane visits.

You don't really need this everywhere - people can just get on/off in the legacy mode - but when you visit an airport that lacks the gear you're just hauling dead weight around.

Okay, so we design a plane from scratch, and retrofit the terminals in the US ... but then you've got a plane that can only be used in the US. And one that can't be resold to Elbonia Airways when Northwestern is done using it.

Yeah, it would def need to be easy and cheap to retrofit. Almost like Segways built into the seat or something? Probably makes more sense to go after carry-on luggage. Getting 200 people to sit in assigned seats doesn't take that long, it's all the crap they bring with them.

In my opinion the carry-on luggage thing is a people problem, and so not easily hacked with technology.

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