The Dumb Way We Board Airplanes Remains Impervious to Good Data
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Nobody boards back to front. First class boards first. Then frequent flyers, who typically get the seats toward the front of the aircraft. Then there's some semi-random zone thing whereby big hold-ups occur waiting for people in the front and middle of the plane to put their bags in the overheads.
If airplanes got rid of the overhead bins and really did load the planes back to front, boarding would go a lot faster.
By the time they got to us regular folks, there was barely anyone left to get on the plane.
Then first class boards.
This. And actually enforce the baggage limits they say they do. I usually only take a small carry on that fits under the next seat but I've seen people with enough provisions to supply the entire eastern front as carry on and it's ridiculous that they're even allowed.
> Nobody boards back to front.
Just to add weight to this, I've flown on at least United, American, Delta, and Southwest, and in my experience, none of them board back-to-front. These are the very airlines mentioned in the article!
> (From the article) United uses an “outside-in” boarding process by which people with window seats board ahead of those on the aisle.
I doubt this as well.
The only thing I've found that does speed up boarding is that some (rare) airports support jetways with two doors: one for the front of the plane, and one for the back. (Albany is the only airport I know of.) Getting on/off the back is significantly quicker in my experience. (Practically no waiting, between the gate and the seat. There's still the line at the gate, of course.)
with rear to front being, Air Canada Alaska American British Airways Continental Frontier JetBlue Spirit Virgin Atlantic
Deplaning is another matter, of course, and generally I think that is actually quite efficient. People who hold up the lines are usually embarrassed and therefore police themselves. Every once in a while a fool holds up the line, but mostly each person adds no more time than the space ahead of them can allow.
Proof? Ok, how often do you find yourself in a secondary lineup, bag in hand, near the door of the aircraft? Nobody in your way now but the lineup ahead to get out of the corridor.
I agree. For all I know, it's part of their business model to make a small profit off of selling fast-passes.
If the weight limits are the same, this will not significant impact costs and will save airports/airplanes time.
A modest proposal: Then take the worst 1% and put them on the no-fly list. Problem solved.
I think this will just create a new 1% of such people. In the new set you just created.
I usually opt to sit and wait outside the gate until I can assume that most people have gotten to their seats inside the plane and won't crowd the aisle. The seats are assigned anyway, it's not like I'd get a better spot by being early. So why not wait outside where there's plenty of space and (usually) fresher air?
No, the only reason I can think of is that people want to make sure they have place for their oversized carry on (as the article alludes to). If that's the case I have no sympathy for them, and hope they all get stuck next to a fat person with a cold.
And again, being in the US - you do have to rush to get that spot as people bring so much oversized carry-on, it's kind of crazy. Never had any issues or felt any rush in Australia.
My bag is not oversized by any means, by the way, but it does need to go in the bin, not under the seat. That's what they have bins for.
I find this valuable because of the following reasons:
a) It allows me to enter an empty plane and find my seat and stow my carry-on (correct size) right with my seat. I can do this without squeezing past people.
b) It allows me to get settled into my seat and get set up (music, computer, book, whatever) and so I can be settled into the routine of the flight. This is much more pleasant than milling around in the terminal, where you can't settle into whatever it is you're going to do on the flight (read, sleep, work, etc)
Essentially I don't agree that waiting in the terminal is better than waiting in the plane. I'd much rather reduce my waiting times and move directly from lounge to plane, than have an intermediate step of waiting at the gate.
1) I find that general boarding involves several minutes of just standing in the jetbridge waiting to get on the plane, which is completely lost time. This is often true on popular routes right up until they close the door.
2) If you board late and you're not in an aisle seat you're going to have to deal with the awkward "ask people to let you in and wait for them to shuffle into the aisle" situation.
3) Seating at gates is a pretty big problem at most airports, which simply weren't built to handle the number of passengers they now have. As often as not you're going to be standing at the gate doing email on your phone because there aren't any comfortable seats available.
1. Able to store your carry on near you (mine is always a backpack, or a laptop bag, or a camera bag)
2. I pick window seats, so I'd like to get to sit down, pop in earphones, and listen to music until I fall asleep.
I also fly first class, so boarding issues don't really impact me anymore.
That said, as an infrequent flyer, I do like you and just wait in the terminal until the end of boarding. No point waiting in the middle of the line - that's the worst of all options. I also make sure my personal carry-on (usually a large laptop bag) has my toothbrush and clean socks, just in case I get stuck checking a bag at the gate.
But, given the option to board early without charge, I'd take it.
While the article suggests that part of the issue is that the airlines create inefficiency in order to be able to offer perks to get around the inefficiency. That's probably a minor consideration (I can easily see the 'rewards program' suit arguing in a meeting to keep it).
But I think there would be a lot of inertia in changing a program like boarding allocations. There are a lot of procedures around boarding - we don't know exactly what 'hooks' the airlines have around their procedures. We also don't know how more complicated systems test with the general public - including first time flyers, people who don't speak the same language as the airline, and other edge cases. The current methods are quite resilient against these problem-cases, and the more-efficient ones may collapse faster as a result.
Essentially I think that it's easy for outsiders to suggest changes - but we should reflect on that like user requests like 'why don't they just change the UI on this software to make it more like facebook?'. It would be good to get an airline insiders knowledge and comments.
Couldn't you just integrate over all possible distributions of that 5% (assuming that number came from somewhere) in the line? Seems like this problem could be easily attacked with math instead of experiment.
If anything I think the 'morons' in the Mythbusters ep were moronic enough. Certainly anyone who travels frequently wil l be able to cite behviour far worse than they modelled.
I don't think that was mythbusters.
Additionally, customers are not rational actors when it comes to boarding. Even if airlines adopted a more efficient method, it would face many problems, like frequent flyers complaining about having to use general boarding and many people holding up the boarding process due to stuffing oversized carry-on baggage into the overhead bins.
But the air crews simply could not tolerate not being able to shoot back.
So if you send out 100 B17s with guns and 80 come back, but they kill N enemy attackers, and 100 B17s without guns and 90 come back, but kill 0 enemy attackers, maybe if N is high enough it's worth it?
The flight service usually boarded from front and rear, but somehow on that day they did front-to-rear. I also simulated different methods - like odd/even seating.
Now, it's not the best, but I ended up on a brief consulting role that ended up nowhere (the real life data indicated no statistical difference in boarding methods whatsoever). What's interesting is I hadn't taken profit motive into account.
Now that I think about it, there really isn't any motive for airlines to board quicker and take off quicker.
[0] : http://blog.chewxy.com/2012/04/04/a-better-passenger-boardin...
There is also landing/takeoff slots, which are outside the control of the airline.
All in all, I doubt boarding faster would help an airline fly a plane more often.
I've flown in countries where they're really strict with enforcing the size limit on carry ons. Boarding was much quicker.
It's not right, but that's how it is.
Basically you just line people up in reverse to the seat numbers and then they walk onto the plane.
"From a data-driven perspective, this is nothing short of maddening. There are many ways to board a plane, with “back-to-front”—the chosen boarding process of most U.S. carriers—the slowest."