
The Dumb Way We Board Airplanes Remains Impervious to Good Data - azth
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-23/the-dumb-way-we-board-airplanes-remains-impervious-to-good-data#r=most%20popular
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crusso
_“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.

~~~
deathanatos
> _“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.)

~~~
brc
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.

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bdamm
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.

~~~
mapt
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.

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josephschmoe
One rule will vastly increase speeds: If you do not bring an overhead carry-
on, your first piece of checked luggage will be free.

If the weight limits are the same, this will not significant impact costs and
will save airports/airplanes time.

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IvyMike
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.

~~~
kamaal
>>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.

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eddiedunn
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.

~~~
brc
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.

~~~
mdorazio
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.

------
brc
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.

~~~
pessimizer
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.

~~~
brc
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.

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mdorazio
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.

~~~
WalterBright
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.

~~~
gamegoblin
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?

~~~
WalterBright
If you lose 20% per mission, you will no longer have an air force within a
couple weeks.

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zippergz
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...

~~~
calbear81
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.

------
kristianp
This was posted two weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637783)

------
chewxy
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.

[0] : [http://blog.chewxy.com/2012/04/04/a-better-passenger-
boardin...](http://blog.chewxy.com/2012/04/04/a-better-passenger-boarding-
system/)

~~~
bostonvaulter2
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.

~~~
brc
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.

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calbear81
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.

~~~
Serow225
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)...

------
tomohawk
If the overhead bins were reserved for certain seats, it seems like boarding
would go a lot smoother.

I've flown in countries where they're really strict with enforcing the size
limit on carry ons. Boarding was much quicker.

~~~
brc
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.

It's not right, but that's how it is.

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acd
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.

~~~
ovulator
They touch on that in the article, it is actually the slowest way to load a
plane. Worse than random.

[http://mythbustersresults.com/airplane-
boarding](http://mythbustersresults.com/airplane-boarding)

