The problem is that families sit in rows together, not usually in columns. And in busy airports it's not very ideal to get split up from your travel partners, especially if they are young, old, need assistance, etc.
I believe the response to this objection is to just have the groups wait for later "flush"es / make "trades" with strangers who would otherwise exit in later waves.
Have y'all flown recently, or ever??? I feel it's hard enough these days to get people on planes to be fully clothed, semi-sober, and to refrain from violence. And somehow we're all going to coordinate perfectly to get this complicated choreography to work?
> How to accommodate the elderly, people with children, and groups.
Guys, you have to read the article at least. It's stated in the "further discussion" section so at least add something more than just repeating the topic.
Or, I suppose, rewritten in the vernacular of this site:
"This comment is obviously written by someone who didn't read the proposal properly".
Your judgement is wrong. I had read that. I retain my opinion of the article. They ignore the elderly, families, and groups. Which are a large portion of travelers. Plus they acknowledge that they are creating passenger conflicts, and don't address that.
Coming up with a better proposal than this is trivial. Here goes.
During flight, lock the overhead bins. When deplaneing, those without overhead luggage go first, from first to last row as now. This makes sense because they generally walk faster because they have less stuff. Those with overhead luggage have to wait for the steward or stewardess to unlock the overhead bins following the fast group, and then exit from last row to first. Therefore those who are slow to get things out of bins, do not slow others. Those needing assistance wait until the very end, as now.
Getting stuff out of bins is the gating factor here. And so there is no passenger conflict about the fast people leaving first, because the others are waiting on the bins being unlocked, then for people behind them to pass. And groups get to leave together.
There you go. A faster approach than now. With fewer problems.
While I reject your condescending tone, locking the overheads is possibly a good idea but requires major equipment upgrades.
I do not believe locking mechanisms in the overhead compartments are currently installed.
Controls to instantly lock/unlock such systems remotely by one attendant, thousands of times, reliably, is yet another challenge. Better to engineer a solution that requires no new equipment.
When I compare tones, mine seems far less condescending than the person I was responding to.
Engineering a solution that creates passenger conflict is not a good idea. I'd rather wait for slow people, than be around a loud argument at the end of a flight. I get enough stress already from hours of being cramped on a flight, I don't want more.
Also you are adding entirely unnecessary requirements to my solution. There is no need for the unlocking to be instant. Just to be doable one by one by someone going around the pace of people dragging luggage. The technology used for security tags in clothing stores would be more than adequate.
That said, I'm not seriously advocating for my solution. I'm just saying that it takes no more than 30 seconds to come up with something better than the one the blog post was about.
Wut?? So if I'm in a window seat, and the folks in the middle and aisle seats have carry-ons, I'm supposed to crawl over them, or have them block the aisle while we somehow shuffle past them? Do you understand the size of the average American?
I live in the USA, and am 6' 3". So yes, I understand the size of the average American.
I've never had a problem going to the bathroom. People get up, sit down. And there is plenty of time to do this while waiting for the line to start moving.
Also, remember that this is not a proposal I'm seriously arguing for. Merely showing how easy it is to come up with a better proposal than the one made.
I mean, yeah. A similar sort of structure is how the Alcubierre metric works. It requires negative energy normal to the manifolds involved. If he described that and everyone replied "You need negative energy" that would be kinda dumb.
This is great. This is mentioned in the discussion topics section ("modeling randomness in gathering belongings"). But I wonder what the distribution of baggage-gathering time looks like? I'd guess pretty positively skewed, i.e. most people are pretty quick but then a few people take a long time or a really long time. The speed of the flush stage of a particular wave is capped at the slowest person in that wave.
What's the point? I'm going to have to wait for my checked bags anyway. Passengers who really care about deplaning quickly should just select seats near the front.
I have calculated this would save between 50 and 150 human life-equivalents of time per year. You can see this calculation if you scroll to the bottom of the simulation page.
Sure, but it doesn’t add up to much useful time per person… Aggregate time saving across large numbers of people just seems like a fairly useless measure in general. To take it to an extreme, if you saved ten seconds in something everybody in the world does once or twice, you’d have saved a very large number of person years in aggregate but made basically no meaningful improvement to any individual’s life…
I’d think airlines would really want to put pax at the front that have tight connections (before or after). Unsure if any think this far ahead though.
But I also think they should put healthy 25 year olds in the emergency exit row for… emergencies, but they’d rather sell those seats to someone that’s often the poorest candidate to execute in an emergency.
Many people don't check baggage at all. This avoids extra fees, avoids waiting for checked baggage, and eliminates the possibility of lost baggage (assuming they don't make you gate check your carry on).
For the airline, quicker deplaning means quicker turnaround, or a chance to give the plane a better clean-up before the next load of passenger shows up.
I almost never check a bag, everything I need fits in a ~35L duffel bag and 20L backpack. If I need prohibited or oversized tools or toys I ship it to my destination by UPS.
I also end up near the back of the plane all the time, because those are the available seats that don't have a higher price tag.
The delay is just a waste, but unfortunately the airlines aren't incentivized to make boarding or deplaning quick, they're trying to upcharge for more expensive seats. All the engineers are sitting at the gate for 15 minutes wondering why everyone's in a rush and paying extra to get "priority boarding" onto a cramped plane, then at the end of the flight, they're sitting in the back of the plane wondering why it takes 15 minutes for everyone to get off the plane, and how this wasteful process could be made more efficient.
In all of my flights I've seen that people allow the row in front of them to deplane first. It's just courtesy I've seen. Is this similar to "fill and flush"?
Airlines would bastardize this by doing it by class then column, as you can't have steerage riff raff get off before double platinum diamond medallion clearly superior than you first class.
In that model, would it faster or slower for someone in the middle of end of the plane?
This would defeat the economics of class seats, which is way more important for the airline than getting people out the aircraft, and it does not address the obvious issue with carry on luggage, which is an even bigger problem in single aisle aircrafts.
And more obviously, the level of coordination required to make it work is just not worth it. Families flying together, babies, people with disabilities, etc., none are considered in the model.
> First Class can keep getting off first, you still get the benefits if you apply this to Coach
Domestic flights on single aisle aircrafts, have several classes (first, extra, etc.), with different price ranges. Even emergency exit seats come with some attached benefits, like priority boarding. Good luck telling customers that they paid extra for an emergency window seat, but have to wait until more than half of the plane have de-boarded to exit.
> Good luck telling customers that they paid extra for an emergency window seat, but have to wait until more than half of the plane have de-boarded to exit.
That's exactly what already happens (at least in Europe), you don't get priority to de-board if you bought seats with extra leg room on the emergency exits, you have to wait.
Why is "people won't listen" a real argument here? They'll do what they're told or they'll get banned from flying on that airline, and possibly pay up to $25k, as it's a violation of 49 U.S.C. § 46504 to interfere with a member of the airline crew.
Next time you're on a flight, listen for the number of people who remove their seatbelts before the seatbelt light goes off, after a crew member specifically says not to do this
I haven't seen any of them fined 25k. Proportionality matters, and getting off the plane as fast as (in your mind) possible isn't going to be realistically enforced.
It really is absurd that people can’t even listen to such a simple rule. What is so hard about it. They really should be giving out these fines for misbehaviour.
This also reminds me of an article I once read in an in-flight magazine about this. It was saying how an airplane’s brakes work really really well, not only at 350km/h when landing, but also at 50km/h when taxiing to gate. It described an incident where during taxiing to gate after landing, somehow some animal managed to jump right in front of the plane forcing the pilot to apply max break, causing a passenger who was handling the overhead bin to die from the injuries.
Actually, just found a picture I took of the article, so here’s the original text. I always think of it when people stand up before the seatbelt sign is off.
> … But ignoring these rules can have serious conseances.
For instance: Do you really remain seated until the plane comes to a complete standstill? German travel journalist Heige Timmerberg likes to tell the story of the dog that ran across the runway in Casablanca, forcing the pilot to slam on the brakes. Brakes that work well at 350 km/h, work well at 50, too - and one of the passengers who had just emptied the overhead bin "flew from row 26 to the lavatory behind the cockpit, and was dead."
> "We don't joke about security," says Fabienne Regilt, member of the lufthansa team.
As a 6' person, if I can't explicitly reserve an exit or aisle seat, I am not flying with your company, because I prefer to not get thrombosis. And I'm sure as hell not going to rely on the willingness of my cofliers to be reasonable about letting me queue so that I end up with the seat I need, while my partner gets the seat next to me.
The more obvious solution is to also use the rear door in addition to the front. Airlines could then charge a premium for those seats as well. No big coordination effort is needed, but it would require some new jetways or some terminal reconfiguration. Other countries do this frequently with no major problems.
Isn't that common in the US? In Europe it's quite usual to have the front door on the jetway for the first half of seats, and a staircase for boarding the last half through the rear door. Thought it was normal procedure, it varies a bit per country and airport here but is common enough, I'd say more than 50% of my flights are configured that way.
> In Europe it's quite usual to have the front door on the jetway for the first half of seats, and a staircase for boarding the last half through the rear door.
This is definitely not usual.
Admittedly, I haven't been to all airports across the US or Europe, but I have been to quite a few, and have yet to see people boarding from the front and back. Closest perhaps was a double bridge used on an Emirates A380.
I just got a flight Stockholm-Prague a week ago, we boarded from both doors. In May I went Stockholm-Zürich, boarded from both doors, then Zürich-Lisbon, same.
Last time I flew to Berlin with EasyJet it also boarded from both doors, now that I'm listing it I can only remember a flight from Oslo-Stockholm with Norwegian where the boarding was done only through the front door. Most of the flights I've taken the past 2 years have boarded from both entrances, I feel it's quite usual.
I haven't been to any of those airports, except for Lisbon. Didn't see any front and back boarding in there. Neither in BCN, MAD, LHR, LGW, IST, or AMS. I have boarded and de-boarded from the back (but not from the front) in a handful of smaller Spanish airports, though.
In the US, I would say that it is not usual at all, or I have been to the wrong airports (IAD, DFW, AUS, IAH, SFO, LAX, JFK, LGA, CLT, ORD). I haven't seen this either in Asia.
Perhaps this is highly airport dependent? Still, I would think that this is far from common.
I think that all flights in Europe I've taken with low cost airlines had both front and back entries (and exits). My memory good back to maybe 10 years and 4-10 flights a year.
I used to fly much, much more but I do not remember that far in the past.
It's pretty uncommon in the U.S. to board a plane from stairs on the tarmac. There's almost always a gate. I haven't seen the "gate for the front, stairs for the back" loading style in Europe, but I've seen two sets of stairs pretty often. If the goal is to save passenger time and inconvenience, having to take a bus out to a hard stand is definitely not worth the payoff of being able to load from both ends.
Loading and unloading from both ends is a lot faster though. United actually had a double ended gate that they were trying out years ago in Denver, which is the best of both worlds and saves a ton of time loading and unloading. It's this really long cantilever thing over the wing to reach the rear entrance. Unfortunately something broke on it one time and the jet bridge fell onto the wing, damaging the airplane, and they gave up on it.
You shouldn't need a bus because the plane is at the gate. Stairs might be an issue for some but anyone that does not want to go down then back up stairs can wait and go out the front through the jetway.
As others have pointed out, this method works great in many other countries.
Right but there are ways to handle this like collapsible barriers that would be quick to put in place. If people prefer to go through the jetway they always can and simply stay seated.
This is proven out already in other countries, the ones that want to leave through the jetway stay seated and still get out faster because even if they are near the back most people around them leave through the rear so they make it out the forward jetway much quicker.
Jetways for boarding and deboarding is most common in the US. A near requirement because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities, and a jetway is deemed reasonable for people who can't do stairs.
Some airports will revert to passenger stairways when there's more planes to put passengers on, and the weather permits. Airports that often do that, may also sometimes use passenger stairways to accelerate deboarding, but passengers aren't very good at doing that; and when overhead bin storage is tight, you may have placed your items in a bin too far forward to retrieve it while passenger motion is towards aft stairs. I can't recall seeing boarding from the front and aft simultaneously.
Very very occasionally, I've seen or heard of airports set up to attach multiple jetbridges to a single aircraft, but that's going to be pretty complex geometry because distance between the front door and the aft door on different planes varies widely.
Unfortunately, no solution that relies on this level of coordination will ever work. We cannot even get people to not block the corridor randomly when boarding or offboarding, enforcing a routine like this is not going to happen.
Sorry for being negative, I like that you came up with something clever. I've seen some similar attempts to make boarding more efficient. I just fly way too frequently and I think the world is not ready for this yet.
You could try to incentivize it - give free checked bags to those with window seats, but charge them for carry ons, and give carry ons for free to the aisle seats.
This is clever thinking, but we've been running airlines for so long now, I can't help but wonder if this has already been tried, and if there were issues with it. Potentical obstacles I can imagine off the top of my head:
- Will people even obey? What if half the people from the wrong side get up too? After a long tiring flight, will that anger people on the correct side and lead to fights? Having to show your ticket to prove you were in the right column to get off is not very customer-friendly
- What about families with children, couples, and groups in general? People want to stay together. It doesn't matter if this is rational or not, it's what people want to feel safe and not anxious
- Is it really even going to make much of a difference? In my experience, people are already mostly grabbing their bags quickly, simultaneously while the rows immediately ahead are starting to exit
And of course, while this can in theory save perhaps a couple minutes for domestic passengers with only a carry-on, even in theory it saves no time at all for anyone who still has to go through a crowded passport control or wait for checked baggage.
Getting off the plane is already fairly quick. Everyone wants to get going, usually the plane is empty in 5 minutes or less.
I think it would help with getting onto the plane. Filling the plane can easily take 20 minutes - which in a half hour turnaround is often the critical path.
The challenge here is you need to get people to enter the plane door in a very precise order. Just 10% of people ignoring instructions probably eliminates most/all of the benefits. Groups who don't want to sit apart or board the plane apart have to go either first or last.
Getting people to board in a certain order isn't particularly difficult. Southwest does it already, even if they only use it to... make sitting in a grounded plane a perk of checking in early? I'm actually not sure why they do it.
Thing is, you need people to board in a super precise order. Just two people swapped around in the line means someone can't get to their seat, delaying the whole boarding process.
That still would be much faster though than the current approach employed by most airlines which makes it more likely to create congestion in the aisle and minimizes how many people can load luggage and take their seat in parallel.
Lots of airlines will gate check your bag for free if the overheads are full, but the overheads are still in high demand because they give you one less errand leaving the destination airport.
I thought Southwest uses “open” seating, where passengers aren’t assigned a seat, but instead just take any unoccupied seat? If so, a perk of being earlier in the boarding order would be that you have a better chance of getting a seat you want, if you have any particular preferences.
Yes, they do, it's great. Being right at the very front of the line is a paid perk for singles, free for families with kids; being in the first main group after that is just a matter of checking in the night before.
Usually I find I can get a seat I don't hate unless I am running so late that I am in the latter half of the 'B' group or anywhere in the 'C' group.
This is why every southwest flight has 20 boomers in wheelchairs at the front of the line for preboard.
One time I was traveling with a blind girl who had a guide dog and the boomer patrol had occupied all the bulkhead space. They seemed to think she should sit with a German Shepherd in her lap. Needless to say I aggressively advocated and reminded the flight crew that FAA regulations entitle persons with guide dogs to a bulkhead seat. Let me tell you, we got some stink eyes from the displaced boomers who didn't want to have to walk an extra six feet to the potty.
They don’t appear to be indexed well anymore. However here[1] is a fairly recent article mentioning the existence of the space rule. If I fly with a guide dog user again I’ll be sure to find the actual rule.
> Filling the plane can easily take 20 minutes - which in a half hour turnaround is often the critical path
can you really reduce it that much, given that the plane needs to be refueled, cargo unloaded and reloaded, etc? like it may be the case that while it's inconvenient for passengers, the airline doesn't really care because it takes them a half hour to turn the plane around on the tarmac side anyway, so there's no benefit from reducing the passenger loading time.
There have been similar simulations for boarding airplanes. I wish I had never heard about them because now I get annoyed almost every time I fly.
As with de-boarding most time is wasted/spent by people standing in the aisle and waiting for someone who is putting their luggage in. The optimal solution has as many passengers loading their luggage in the overhead compartment in parallel as possible. The ideal way to do this would be that we first have passengers with window seats board with one person for each row. We should only use every other row to ensure people can maneuver. So we'd first board seats NA, N-2A, N-4A, etc. down to row 1 with N being the last row. Then NF, N-2F, N-4F etc. And then N-1A, N-3A and so on. Then we work our way through the middle seats and then aisle seats.
The current approach which commonly boards people starting from the front or back FORCES congestion and minimizes probability of two people reaching their seat at the same time and being able to put up their luggage in parallel.
Even if the approach I describe is broken because groups board together, it becomes at worst a random boarding order which is still much more efficient than the current nonsense.
The reason we cannot board more efficiently is because it's unintuitive, people don't like it and behave like wild animals in groups.
> Even if the approach I describe is broken because groups board together, it becomes at worst a random boarding order which is still much more efficient than the current nonsense.
I think it can quickly become worse than random.
Imagine you have the perfect sequence for max parallelism, but right in the middle is one 6 person family group who are going to take 10 minutes to get seated while they arrange toys and stuff for each child, blocking the aisle the whole time.
With the perfect sequence, this halts all boarding for those 10 mins, since people need to pass the blockage for the scheme to work. Whereas with random boarding, there will actually be many people who manage to get seated during those 10 mins, because there will be a bunch of people who, by chance, are seated between the door and the blockage and can get to their seats.
Unless the method is reactive, that family would always lead to the entire aisle being filled within seconds with waiting passengers who need to pass them unless the family is very far back in the plane.
Most flights I've taken in the last 5+ years use group boarding, which roughly approximates filling outside in (not front to back).
It only roughly approximates though because the first few groups are usually not outside-in (eg. first class, premium/rewards customers, veterans, families with small children).
I never understood the concept of boarding from the front. I would never want to be the first on a plane; regardless of status. And this means that every single person passing them will bump, cough, shuffle, past those that boarded first.
I guess it's just that people would feel bad going *last*? Psychology is weird - but powerful.
At least for me, the main benefit of boarding early is still having carry-on space. Last thing I wanna do is to have to check any luggage and then wait forever to retrieve it later.
On european airlines, luggage rarely overflows the overhead bins because you have to pay to use the overhead bins (often nearly the same as the cost of your seat on short cheap flights). The only storage you can use for free is the space under the seat.
I always board as soon as my group is called. It ensures that I have space next to me for my overhead luggage, and I can start settling in, sometimes going to sleep. Plus, I'm already uncomfortable at the airport, what's a little more discomfort on the plane?
> The challenge here is you need to get people to enter the plane door in a very precise order.
Small amounts of money are often very motivating.
You could, for example, say that anyone can enter or leave the plane in any order they like. However, if they do so before their turn in the system, they don't get a $10 refund on their ticket. If they don't present their ticket, they are assumed to have gone early.
The question then, is whether the benefit would remain with proportional instead of total compliance, and whether the benefit outweighs the costs of enforcement.
My first thought is that there no way the boarding time is worth $10 per passenger to the airline, and no way they increase the cost $10 and don’t lose tickets to other people just using aggregate services like google flights and picking cheap options
Every plane I've been on in the last decade already sorts people by "boarding groups" which are relatively fine-grained. They won't let you onto the boarding ramp unless you're in the correct group, which they check by scanning your boarding pass. All they would have to do is make those boarding groups be based on your seating position instead of how much extra money you paid.
Exactly. This proposal entirely ignores human nature, and the author has obviously not done any research into the problem beyond being annoyed while waiting to exit an aircraft.
One solution might be to have lights that light up when it's time for your column to deplane.
A more evil solution would be to use physical barriers that only open when it's a given column's turn. Maybe replace the seatbelts with rollercoaster-style restraints for extra fun.
> What about families with children, couples, and groups in general?
Have them deplane either first or last. The page seems to suggest that waiting for the next "wave" ain't a huge deal, so having groups wait until their last column is ready to go (or worst case, until all individuals have deplaned) could probably work.
> Is it really even going to make much of a difference?
Maybe not in isolation, but maybe the aggregate effects (e.g. more flights per day) would justify it?
Yeah, I read analyses like this article and just think "this person doesn't realize that they don't think/act like most people".
Most people flying are not traveling alone. It's not just the oft quoted "families with small children". What about couples/friends/colleagues. People traveling together largely sit in the same rows, not the same columns, and they want to exit together.
These kind of analyses (especially the "if everyone saved 13 seconds we'd size the equivalent of 20 lives!" part) always make me a bit said because, in a lot of cases, it's clear the author understands math but not humans.
I've considered the "group" issue at length and do not consider it a major issue. People like us are obligated to improve the world for the less enlightened.
In a world where we can’t convince people to wash their hands (among other more controversial public health asks that shall remain nameless to prevent ideological thread derailment) I don’t think we can convince people to not descend into chaos when asked to do something like this. It’s a great idea for efficient pipelining, but humans view the emptying of each row in order as more fair and common sense. It doesn’t require coordination beyond the people within rows and is resilient to people bucking the protocol.
I wonder how rapidly this column wise deplaning breaks down in the face of random compliance and confusion.
I guess families with young kids that would have to leave the kid in the window aisle, distressed and upset while the only people they know are leaving them in a vessel with people they don't know, are just not "enlightened" enough.
I implore you to consider the group issue in more detail, and perhaps with a touch of human empathy this time.
The notion of 3 travelers on window, center, and aisle being OK to wait through FIVE flushes (aisle, opposite aisle, center, opposite center, window) to reconnect -- and the notion this is "enlightened" -- I can't.
The notion that ALL sets of 2+ travelers now have to wait at the end of the gangway just inside the terminal, the disaster that would create at the gate, is just kicking the can off the plane in a way that doesn't actually help the next passengers get on any sooner. The gate -- and all gates -- would be a disaster.
The author has definitely thought about those concerns, since they're mentioned on the linked page. I think it's just a neat simulation, it's not necessarily a comment on someone's ability to empathize with other human beings.
The author thought about those concerns, but somehow doesn't think they're a big deal, as opposed to making the entire thing completely infeasible.
Another commenter put it brilliantly: "My perpetual motion machine works brilliantly, just have that 'unresolved issue' of the second law of thermodynamics".
Seems great in princinple, but I'm not sure this would work when coming up against human behaviour. It's as much as the stewards can do to stop some people charging down the aisle the minute the plane comes to a standstill, let alone communicating something this nuanced to everyone so they understand.
It also means that families who are travelling together would need to deplane separately, which can screw up things in terms of helping each other with bags, and also wouldn't work with families who have multiple kids of an age where they need to walk with their parents. It feels like the kind of fragile system where you'd end up with so many exceptions that it becomes potentially even more messy as you'd need to communicate those exceptions and people would need to understand them.
That's probably why OP said it's open for discussion. But yeah herding (isn't the correct term flight attendants and not stewards?) the passengers would be difficult.
Perhaps the procedure should be, if everyone in your group is holding all their belongings - either in the aisle or standing in the footspace of an aisle seat (so rows C and D in a 3-3 configuration), then they can join the deplaning wave. But if you're standing in the aisle but one from your group is still crouched in a window seat and will need to grab their bag, and you don't want to abandon them, then you don't occupy the aisle go back to your (presumably aisle-) seat and wait for the next wave/go into an empty row so the crouched passenger can stand in row C/D, and wait for the wave to finish so they can grab their bag.
If you’re worried about that tell the stewardess before your descent begins, they can prioritize you, up to and including moving you to first class just before landing.
The simulation of the status quo makes the assumption that aisle seat passengers wait until the row ahead of them is clear before collecting their luggage, nobody ever manages to squeeze past someone collecting their luggage, nobody in a middle or window seat is ever able to retrieve or be given their luggage until the aisle opposite them is completely clear, nobody ever walks past someone in an aisle or middle seat that hasn't collected their luggage yet etc...
Suffice to say, this is not my experience of boarding and leaving aircraft.
The simulation assumes that ONE person in the status quo has a 0 second assemble belongings step, and just waits "minBuffer" time - so in the simulation on average this is 2 second delay rather than 5:
That feels like an American thing, I fly in Europe and my luggage is almost always above my head or across the aisle. Do American fliers put it in the first space they see in the overhead luggage?
In my American experience, flights these days are almost always completely full, and almost every passenger is bringing both an under-seat and overhead-bin carry-on item.
The last 10% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage near their seats. The last 5% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage available at all.
"Put it in the first space you see" is often explicitly an instruction that the cabin crew gives to boarders as overhead space starts dwindling. Passengers aren't doing it out of preference.
EasyJet (ie, in Europe) is constantly packed, and people who board later frequently need to find space elsewhere for their bag, because the space near them has already been taken.
Airlines added baggage fees to capture more revenue. Passengers started bringing more carry-on luggage as a result, filling up the overhead bins. It now takes longer to gather ultra-heavy, overlarge carry-ons from the bins to exit the plane, affecting exit times.
Stop nickel-and-diming for luggage and focus on efficiency gains like gate-checked small luggage. Add front and back exits to every gate ramp to improve boarding and unboarding.
I've often wondered whether they could "containerize" passengers by having the seating as a whole remove from the plane. People then have all the time in the world to get seated outbound, and additional space to deplane at their own speed inbound. You could even come up with a system for putting luggage directly under their seats obviating the need to collect it separately. (It would of course be a massive redesign of planes and airports, so probably not an easy starter).
So passengers crowd into narrow tubes a bit earlier, and then the narrow tubes are winched into the aircraft with the sort of painstaking precision that takes several minutes? Even assuming airframes could be redesigned to make this possible [at zero cost, without implications for structural integrity or operational complexity of the resulting aircraft] I'm not sure who benefits here?
Not sure if it needs to be a tube. Maybe the seats could be on a rail that slides into the airplane. Having to move the nose and tail of the plane up for this also brings us closer to my dream of flushing the entire airplane with Clorox between flights.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadsource code at: www.github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush
> How to accommodate the elderly, people with children, and groups.
Guys, you have to read the article at least. It's stated in the "further discussion" section so at least add something more than just repeating the topic.
Or, I suppose, rewritten in the vernacular of this site:
"This comment is obviously written by someone who didn't read the proposal properly".
Coming up with a better proposal than this is trivial. Here goes.
During flight, lock the overhead bins. When deplaneing, those without overhead luggage go first, from first to last row as now. This makes sense because they generally walk faster because they have less stuff. Those with overhead luggage have to wait for the steward or stewardess to unlock the overhead bins following the fast group, and then exit from last row to first. Therefore those who are slow to get things out of bins, do not slow others. Those needing assistance wait until the very end, as now.
Getting stuff out of bins is the gating factor here. And so there is no passenger conflict about the fast people leaving first, because the others are waiting on the bins being unlocked, then for people behind them to pass. And groups get to leave together.
There you go. A faster approach than now. With fewer problems.
I do not believe locking mechanisms in the overhead compartments are currently installed.
Controls to instantly lock/unlock such systems remotely by one attendant, thousands of times, reliably, is yet another challenge. Better to engineer a solution that requires no new equipment.
Engineering a solution that creates passenger conflict is not a good idea. I'd rather wait for slow people, than be around a loud argument at the end of a flight. I get enough stress already from hours of being cramped on a flight, I don't want more.
Also you are adding entirely unnecessary requirements to my solution. There is no need for the unlocking to be instant. Just to be doable one by one by someone going around the pace of people dragging luggage. The technology used for security tags in clothing stores would be more than adequate.
That said, I'm not seriously advocating for my solution. I'm just saying that it takes no more than 30 seconds to come up with something better than the one the blog post was about.
I've never had a problem going to the bathroom. People get up, sit down. And there is plenty of time to do this while waiting for the line to start moving.
Also, remember that this is not a proposal I'm seriously arguing for. Merely showing how easy it is to come up with a better proposal than the one made.
> Second Law Of Thermodynamics
Other than a few details to work out, my perpetual motion machine is going to revolutionize aviation.
But I also think they should put healthy 25 year olds in the emergency exit row for… emergencies, but they’d rather sell those seats to someone that’s often the poorest candidate to execute in an emergency.
I also end up near the back of the plane all the time, because those are the available seats that don't have a higher price tag.
The delay is just a waste, but unfortunately the airlines aren't incentivized to make boarding or deplaning quick, they're trying to upcharge for more expensive seats. All the engineers are sitting at the gate for 15 minutes wondering why everyone's in a rush and paying extra to get "priority boarding" onto a cramped plane, then at the end of the flight, they're sitting in the back of the plane wondering why it takes 15 minutes for everyone to get off the plane, and how this wasteful process could be made more efficient.
Note that this is from a boarding, not deplaning viewpoint, but the concepts are similar.
In that model, would it faster or slower for someone in the middle of end of the plane?
That's by far the easiest issue to handle: don't change a thing... they get off first exactly how they do now.
And more obviously, the level of coordination required to make it work is just not worth it. Families flying together, babies, people with disabilities, etc., none are considered in the model.
-Groups can wait for later "Flush" es - there is flexibility since I think you can fit a little more than one person in the aisle per row.
Domestic flights on single aisle aircrafts, have several classes (first, extra, etc.), with different price ranges. Even emergency exit seats come with some attached benefits, like priority boarding. Good luck telling customers that they paid extra for an emergency window seat, but have to wait until more than half of the plane have de-boarded to exit.
That's exactly what already happens (at least in Europe), you don't get priority to de-board if you bought seats with extra leg room on the emergency exits, you have to wait.
I haven't seen any of them fined 25k. Proportionality matters, and getting off the plane as fast as (in your mind) possible isn't going to be realistically enforced.
This also reminds me of an article I once read in an in-flight magazine about this. It was saying how an airplane’s brakes work really really well, not only at 350km/h when landing, but also at 50km/h when taxiing to gate. It described an incident where during taxiing to gate after landing, somehow some animal managed to jump right in front of the plane forcing the pilot to apply max break, causing a passenger who was handling the overhead bin to die from the injuries.
Actually, just found a picture I took of the article, so here’s the original text. I always think of it when people stand up before the seatbelt sign is off.
> … But ignoring these rules can have serious conseances. For instance: Do you really remain seated until the plane comes to a complete standstill? German travel journalist Heige Timmerberg likes to tell the story of the dog that ran across the runway in Casablanca, forcing the pilot to slam on the brakes. Brakes that work well at 350 km/h, work well at 50, too - and one of the passengers who had just emptied the overhead bin "flew from row 26 to the lavatory behind the cockpit, and was dead." > "We don't joke about security," says Fabienne Regilt, member of the lufthansa team.
Now you have to play with the airport itself. Most wouldn't have enough bridges to lend two per gate.
This is definitely not usual.
Admittedly, I haven't been to all airports across the US or Europe, but I have been to quite a few, and have yet to see people boarding from the front and back. Closest perhaps was a double bridge used on an Emirates A380.
Last time I flew to Berlin with EasyJet it also boarded from both doors, now that I'm listing it I can only remember a flight from Oslo-Stockholm with Norwegian where the boarding was done only through the front door. Most of the flights I've taken the past 2 years have boarded from both entrances, I feel it's quite usual.
In the US, I would say that it is not usual at all, or I have been to the wrong airports (IAD, DFW, AUS, IAH, SFO, LAX, JFK, LGA, CLT, ORD). I haven't seen this either in Asia.
Perhaps this is highly airport dependent? Still, I would think that this is far from common.
I'm very surprised that so many people are telling me this is uncommon, I've been through this setup countless times.
I used to fly much, much more but I do not remember that far in the past.
Loading and unloading from both ends is a lot faster though. United actually had a double ended gate that they were trying out years ago in Denver, which is the best of both worlds and saves a ton of time loading and unloading. It's this really long cantilever thing over the wing to reach the rear entrance. Unfortunately something broke on it one time and the jet bridge fell onto the wing, damaging the airplane, and they gave up on it.
As others have pointed out, this method works great in many other countries.
This is proven out already in other countries, the ones that want to leave through the jetway stay seated and still get out faster because even if they are near the back most people around them leave through the rear so they make it out the forward jetway much quicker.
Some airports will revert to passenger stairways when there's more planes to put passengers on, and the weather permits. Airports that often do that, may also sometimes use passenger stairways to accelerate deboarding, but passengers aren't very good at doing that; and when overhead bin storage is tight, you may have placed your items in a bin too far forward to retrieve it while passenger motion is towards aft stairs. I can't recall seeing boarding from the front and aft simultaneously.
Very very occasionally, I've seen or heard of airports set up to attach multiple jetbridges to a single aircraft, but that's going to be pretty complex geometry because distance between the front door and the aft door on different planes varies widely.
Also you cannot exit with the people you sit next too (like your toddler who will have to make their own way off?).
And that's assuming anyone actually wants to minimise average time. Airlines don't. Neither do most passengers.
Sorry for being negative, I like that you came up with something clever. I've seen some similar attempts to make boarding more efficient. I just fly way too frequently and I think the world is not ready for this yet.
- Will people even obey? What if half the people from the wrong side get up too? After a long tiring flight, will that anger people on the correct side and lead to fights? Having to show your ticket to prove you were in the right column to get off is not very customer-friendly
- What about families with children, couples, and groups in general? People want to stay together. It doesn't matter if this is rational or not, it's what people want to feel safe and not anxious
- Is it really even going to make much of a difference? In my experience, people are already mostly grabbing their bags quickly, simultaneously while the rows immediately ahead are starting to exit
And of course, while this can in theory save perhaps a couple minutes for domestic passengers with only a carry-on, even in theory it saves no time at all for anyone who still has to go through a crowded passport control or wait for checked baggage.
I think it would help with getting onto the plane. Filling the plane can easily take 20 minutes - which in a half hour turnaround is often the critical path.
The challenge here is you need to get people to enter the plane door in a very precise order. Just 10% of people ignoring instructions probably eliminates most/all of the benefits. Groups who don't want to sit apart or board the plane apart have to go either first or last.
also have a better chance of not having to risk getting separated from your carry-on baggage because the plane's already full
Usually I find I can get a seat I don't hate unless I am running so late that I am in the latter half of the 'B' group or anywhere in the 'C' group.
One time I was traveling with a blind girl who had a guide dog and the boomer patrol had occupied all the bulkhead space. They seemed to think she should sit with a German Shepherd in her lap. Needless to say I aggressively advocated and reminded the flight crew that FAA regulations entitle persons with guide dogs to a bulkhead seat. Let me tell you, we got some stink eyes from the displaced boomers who didn't want to have to walk an extra six feet to the potty.
Google didn't find those regulations for me.
[1] https://upgradedpoints.com/travel/airlines/ultimate-guide-to...
can you really reduce it that much, given that the plane needs to be refueled, cargo unloaded and reloaded, etc? like it may be the case that while it's inconvenient for passengers, the airline doesn't really care because it takes them a half hour to turn the plane around on the tarmac side anyway, so there's no benefit from reducing the passenger loading time.
fuel and luggage crews can be quick. I've seen a luggage crew unload and reload a plane inside 8 minutes, including loading 2 airfreight containers.
As with de-boarding most time is wasted/spent by people standing in the aisle and waiting for someone who is putting their luggage in. The optimal solution has as many passengers loading their luggage in the overhead compartment in parallel as possible. The ideal way to do this would be that we first have passengers with window seats board with one person for each row. We should only use every other row to ensure people can maneuver. So we'd first board seats NA, N-2A, N-4A, etc. down to row 1 with N being the last row. Then NF, N-2F, N-4F etc. And then N-1A, N-3A and so on. Then we work our way through the middle seats and then aisle seats.
The current approach which commonly boards people starting from the front or back FORCES congestion and minimizes probability of two people reaching their seat at the same time and being able to put up their luggage in parallel.
Even if the approach I describe is broken because groups board together, it becomes at worst a random boarding order which is still much more efficient than the current nonsense.
The reason we cannot board more efficiently is because it's unintuitive, people don't like it and behave like wild animals in groups.
I think it can quickly become worse than random.
Imagine you have the perfect sequence for max parallelism, but right in the middle is one 6 person family group who are going to take 10 minutes to get seated while they arrange toys and stuff for each child, blocking the aisle the whole time.
With the perfect sequence, this halts all boarding for those 10 mins, since people need to pass the blockage for the scheme to work. Whereas with random boarding, there will actually be many people who manage to get seated during those 10 mins, because there will be a bunch of people who, by chance, are seated between the door and the blockage and can get to their seats.
such a group is slower, certainly.
they do not take 10 minutes.
It only roughly approximates though because the first few groups are usually not outside-in (eg. first class, premium/rewards customers, veterans, families with small children).
I guess it's just that people would feel bad going *last*? Psychology is weird - but powerful.
That really changes the dynamics.
Small amounts of money are often very motivating.
You could, for example, say that anyone can enter or leave the plane in any order they like. However, if they do so before their turn in the system, they don't get a $10 refund on their ticket. If they don't present their ticket, they are assumed to have gone early.
The question then, is whether the benefit would remain with proportional instead of total compliance, and whether the benefit outweighs the costs of enforcement.
There's this 2015 article on doing essentially what he/she is suggesting: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5877863/it-takes-forever-to-get...
There's a paper on solving the problem by assigning passengers to seats so that their luggage is evenly spread throughout the overhead bins: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096969971...
There's a paper here on other methods tried, including creating "pre boarding" areas for passengers: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269466040_Speeding_...
The first step in any scientific endeavor should always be a literature search.. see what's been tried, and what worked and what didn't.
One solution might be to have lights that light up when it's time for your column to deplane.
A more evil solution would be to use physical barriers that only open when it's a given column's turn. Maybe replace the seatbelts with rollercoaster-style restraints for extra fun.
> What about families with children, couples, and groups in general?
Have them deplane either first or last. The page seems to suggest that waiting for the next "wave" ain't a huge deal, so having groups wait until their last column is ready to go (or worst case, until all individuals have deplaned) could probably work.
> Is it really even going to make much of a difference?
Maybe not in isolation, but maybe the aggregate effects (e.g. more flights per day) would justify it?
Most people flying are not traveling alone. It's not just the oft quoted "families with small children". What about couples/friends/colleagues. People traveling together largely sit in the same rows, not the same columns, and they want to exit together.
These kind of analyses (especially the "if everyone saved 13 seconds we'd size the equivalent of 20 lives!" part) always make me a bit said because, in a lot of cases, it's clear the author understands math but not humans.
I wonder how rapidly this column wise deplaning breaks down in the face of random compliance and confusion.
I implore you to consider the group issue in more detail, and perhaps with a touch of human empathy this time.
This really says everything you need to know about this "analysis".
The notion that ALL sets of 2+ travelers now have to wait at the end of the gangway just inside the terminal, the disaster that would create at the gate, is just kicking the can off the plane in a way that doesn't actually help the next passengers get on any sooner. The gate -- and all gates -- would be a disaster.
Another commenter put it brilliantly: "My perpetual motion machine works brilliantly, just have that 'unresolved issue' of the second law of thermodynamics".
It also means that families who are travelling together would need to deplane separately, which can screw up things in terms of helping each other with bags, and also wouldn't work with families who have multiple kids of an age where they need to walk with their parents. It feels like the kind of fragile system where you'd end up with so many exceptions that it becomes potentially even more messy as you'd need to communicate those exceptions and people would need to understand them.
Perhaps the procedure should be, if everyone in your group is holding all their belongings - either in the aisle or standing in the footspace of an aisle seat (so rows C and D in a 3-3 configuration), then they can join the deplaning wave. But if you're standing in the aisle but one from your group is still crouched in a window seat and will need to grab their bag, and you don't want to abandon them, then you don't occupy the aisle go back to your (presumably aisle-) seat and wait for the next wave/go into an empty row so the crouched passenger can stand in row C/D, and wait for the wave to finish so they can grab their bag.
If they care about it then allocating seats closer to exit for people with connected flights would make more difference.
Suffice to say, this is not my experience of boarding and leaving aircraft.
https://github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush/blob/fc0fa73b5879...
The last 10% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage near their seats. The last 5% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage available at all.
"Put it in the first space you see" is often explicitly an instruction that the cabin crew gives to boarders as overhead space starts dwindling. Passengers aren't doing it out of preference.
Stop nickel-and-diming for luggage and focus on efficiency gains like gate-checked small luggage. Add front and back exits to every gate ramp to improve boarding and unboarding.