I never understood why people usually rush to board the plane, only to end up sitting in a cramped airplane chair and breathing stuffy air.
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.
I'm a tallish guy (6"2) and the seats here in the US in particular seem incredibly small, so even with a small backpack with me I'd far prefer to get it in the overhead bin than have it stashed underneath the seat in front of me.
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.
That certainly contributes. But I can check my bag for free (as a frequent flyer) and I still never do for several reasons. It saves me a lot of time, being able to walk directly off the plane and to my ride rather than waiting half an hour at baggage claim. It is impossible for my bag to get lost or mis-routed, which is a major hassle when I'm on a short turnaround business trip. And finally, it makes it much easier for me to switch flights at the last minute, which I do with some frequency when there's a delay on my original flight. These things are small, but they add up when you fly a lot.
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 fly often enough that I have frequent flyer status and get access to early boarding.
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.
100% agree as a fellow frequent flyer. Additionally
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.
I like sitting in the window seat, so I'd rather sit on the plane a little longer and not have to climb over people to get to my seat. But to each their own!
I am similar. I wait until the last minute to board, given that my seat is reserved anyways. As a bonus, I can use the internet until I'm on the plane, which is great when I'm out of country and can't be connected through my phone. Also, the lines are usually atrocious on flights to/from China, so waiting is the best option.
It's not just oversized carry-ons. There isn't space for every single passenger to bring a full-size (but within stated limits) carry-on plus personal item. And with carriers charging for checked bags, it's worse than it would be otherwise.
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.
My solution to boarding airplanes would be that you line up the passengers in lines at the gate in reverse to what the seat number they have, last seats first in queue, lowest seat numbers last in queue. So you reverse the seat number so seat 01A-E boards last. 02 second last and so forth.
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."
The mythbusters segment alluded to in the article is quite interesting to watch. I think they did a quite good attempt at creating a real-life scenario for boarding a plane.
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.
I don't like the 5% problem people that Mythbusters added to the mix. Boarding back to front is sensitive to morons, and they literally and arbitrarily guaranteed that 1 out of 20 people would delay the line, causing everyone to have to wait. If they did it at an even increment, that would be the worst situation possible for back-to-fronters.
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.
The moron-boarder is a non-trivial issue. I don't think you can adequately model that type of behaviour. Any method has to be robust to problem boarders - people who go for the bathroom, can't find their seat, bring on too much luggage, don't speak the language, etc.
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 think this can be summarized as: Airline boarding is terrible because airlines are profit maximizers, not customer service maximizers. As the article points out, airlines are actually incentivized not to make the boarding process better since they can charge more for things like priority boarding and checked bags, as well as encourage customers down the frequent flyer status path. As long as the experience is almost the same across airlines and they are not losing customers, there is no reason to change the process.
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.
In WW2, statisticians determined that if B-17s flew their missions unarmed, they would have a higher survival rate. Unarmed B-17's would be quite a bit lighter, and so could fly higher and faster.
But the air crews simply could not tolerate not being able to shoot back.
I have no idea about the statistics, but in a wartime scenario this leaves out a crucial factor: number of enemies killed
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?
“back-to-front”—the chosen boarding process of most U.S. carriers
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.
Last time I flew Alaska (shortly after the Superbowl), they had a boarding group for people wearing Russell Wilson jerseys that boarded just after their military service personnel group.
By the time they got to us regular folks, there was barely anyone left to get on the plane.
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.
> “back-to-front”—the chosen boarding process of most U.S. carriers
> 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.)
Virgin Australia domestic planes sometimes board without jetways (even in airports with jetways). I believe this is to save on landing fees. When they do this, they open front and back doors with stairs. These planes board significantly faster than using a jetway and single door, even accounting for people having to go down stairs and across the tarmac.
Yes, but I bet check-in, or wherever they enforce the carry on, was slower. That is why they don't enforce it regularly - because the customer blowback and holdups at the check-in are the airlines problem. Whereas people bringing on oversized carry-on because a customer-customer problem, and less of the airlines fault.
A couple of years back I was stuck in a crappy flight, so mid flight I decided to write a simple simulation of boarding flights[0].
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.
I would argue that if they could board/take off quicker they could squeeze in an extra flight a day (possibly), which would reduce their costs. But it might be hard to recoup the amount lost from the early boarding fees.
Perhaps the pilot procedures take x amount of time - which is fixed. Whether boarding takes x, or x-10 minutes wouldn't change the ability of the flight to leave.
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 fly a lot, so I think I probably feel the pain of this issue more than the average person. And I have to say, I'm kind of baffled by the amount of time that is spent discussing it. Yeah, it's kind of frustrating, but is this really such a huge problem that it deserves this kind of dissection? Or is it just that it's a visible problem, and one that's easy to grasp, so everyone thinks they can come up with a better way to do it? I don't doubt that improvements could be made, but even in the best case, this isn't going to change the world or even make the average person's life significantly better...
Actually, if you consider how much time is wasted in an inefficient boarding process and how much anger/frustration it causes people, it probably adds up to an insane amount of lost productivity.
I suspect with enough data you could do a bayesian analysis and pick out the troublesome people who screw up the boarding process for everyone. ("We notice that whenever Jane P. Slowpoke is on a flight, it correlates to it leaving 3 minutes later")
A modest proposal: Then take the worst 1% and put them on the no-fly list. Problem solved.
Amazing how we assume there is a need to board the plane faster. It likely doesn't matter how quickly you can board the plane, since the process of loading luggage, fuel, and preparing the airplane for flight will still take as long as it does and often takes longer. Have you ever sat in your seat and watched the baggage handlers load luggage?
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 don't understand why we haven't containerized & mechanized luggage after it passes through whatever mandatory security exists. Those baggage handlers + conveyor belts aren't just slow, they are dealing with things well beyond the weight limit at which average humans are able to set things down gently, and they're doing it at the limit of their arm extension - which often translates into a throwing motion.
Dumb question - but why is luggage above instead of below the seat? I seem to find that a lot of slowness comes from maneuvering a 35lb bag up over your head. When the plane lands, pulling it down is an act of controlled chaos hoping you don't take anyone out while lowering your luggage.
The area at the top of the cabin is pretty much 'dead space' in terms of the airframe. In contrast, there's a metric shit-ton of wiring and various piping under the floor (with easy maintenance access by popping up floor panels). There's also other important things under there, like the wing spar pass-through :) If you raised the seats to put the luggage there, the curved sides of the cabin wouldn't allow you to put a seat near the window, so you'd lose a lot of valuable seating area (which airlines track to fractions of an inch)...
48 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 70.5 ms ] threadI 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.
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."
http://mythbustersresults.com/airplane-boarding
http://mythbustersresults.com/airplane-boarding
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637783
If the weight limits are the same, this will not significant impact costs and will save airports/airplanes time.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.