
A Better Way to Load a Plane - 11ren
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6562852
======
dissenter
Airline recap: entirely focused on operations, always on the brink of
collapse. Operations consist largely of optimizations problems, so lots of
attention is paid to these problems (peanuts vs. pretzels). For whatever
reason customers are not insulated from the volatility (pretzels, bag fees,
route duration, availability, etc., in addition to price fluctuation).

Typically you see finely-tuned optimization in old and evolved markets, e.g.,
cola, where it makes sense, and where customers are insulated from changes in
the product or service. Here though it reeks of over-optimization and
misapplied attention. Nobody makes a fuss about boarding the bus. When the
price of corn goes up I don't have to use a can-opener on my soda.

What's wrong with airplanes? Why don't they work like buses? Let's try to
figure this out. Investors have long recognized airlines as a valuable service
but a terrible business.

1.) We really like to fly but our technology is behind the curve?

2.) Irrationality of consumers has created government controls which muck too
much with an already fragile system? (security lines, shoe removal, bomb
sniffing, personal searches, over-training of pilots, too-expensive pilots,
burdensome safety regulations, burdensome inspections, all of these
perpetuated by expectation)

3.) The average passenger does not fly enough, and so he is inefficient?

4.) Dependent on fixed-location airports? And their regulation?

5.) There's no clear cause and effect, it's simply a manifestation of the
system?

6.) ?

7.) Demand for flight is very volatile but the capital which supports it is
very expensive and illiquid?

(one red-herring: fuel efficiency, planes appear to be more fuel efficient
than driving alone)

(another red-herring: this google hit
[http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2005/0928business_morriso...](http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2005/0928business_morrison.aspx)
states the obvious but does little to explain what makes the airline industry
any different from anybody else dependent on large capital investments. sure
they have to buy planes. and cola bottlers have to build plants.)

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markessien
This is pointless, because boarding time does not waste any time. When a plane
lands, it has to stay in the airport for quite a bit of time in most cases -
even if you made boarding more efficient, you would not save any time.
Refueling, getting in the right take off slot take longer than boarding the
plane.

And the question is - does this method feel better to the passengers getting
on? I don't know, but I kinda doubt it.

~~~
aneesh
I don't think the time taken for refueling, etc is the limiting factor. There
are a couple sequences of events that need to happen (simultaneously) to get
the plane ready to leave.

Sequence 1: allow arriving passengers to deplane, then clean the plane, board
new passengers

Sequence 2: Refueling, other maintenance

Sequence 3: load checked baggage

The time taken to ready the plane is the maximum of the times for the 3
sequences above. It seems refueling takes less than 30 minutes
(<http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20061018151916AAMkss8>), and I'd
guess the checked luggage can be loaded within 30 minutes as well.

I'm inclined to believe that deplaning, then cleaning, then boarding new
passengers takes longer than 30 minutes, and boarding passengers IS indeed a
bottleneck (unless there are special circumstances like deicing at the gate).

~~~
markessien
Boarding passengers takes less than 20 minutes in most cases. Even with very
fast airlines like easyjet, the plane sits longer the passengers board.

Also, you know that airports queue planes, right? So a plane can't just hurry
up to fill in passengers and take off.

And in any case, why? Let's say you saved enough time to make an extra trip in
a single day, then it would be worth it, but this is not going to save it. So
you finish your pilots workday 20 minutes earlier, this is no saving. And if
you are pushing your planes that hard anyways, there is no time for proper
plane maintenance and checkups.

I've done a lot of short trips within Europe by plane, and I've never observed
boarding time to be an important factor.

~~~
nostrademons
In 3 of the last 4 flights I've taken, boarding was the limiting factor. We
left the gate within 5 minutes after the last person boarded, and were
airborne shortly after without having to wait on the tarmac. On one of those
flights, the plane didn't finish boarding until 10-15 minutes after it was
scheduled to take off.

Curiously, the one exception was a United red-eye back from SF to Boston. And
I think they may've been using this boarding method - the gate attendants said
that the boarding groups were window seats first, then middle, then aisle.
There certainly was no rhyme or reason to seating within boarding groups, and
there were about 12 boarding groups.

~~~
markessien
But when did you start boarding? When did the planes arrive? They usually make
you start boarding about 20 minutes before they are allowed to take off, so
people sit in the plane the minimum amount of time.

~~~
nostrademons
Planes usually arrived about 40-45 minutes, sometimes up to an hour before we
started boarding.

In 2 of the 3 flights, that might've been the case. But that other one, we
were actually late, so I don't think they delayed boarding so we wouldn't have
to wait. Actually, we started boarding about 15-20 minutes after we were
scheduled to start boarding.

Cleaning seems like the real bottleneck, but assuming they can't get the
flight attendants to work any faster, any time saved on boarding shortens the
deplane/clean/board cycle.

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yagibear
_For simplicity, his model assumes a plane with 120 passengers seated in 40
rows, each with a central aisle having three seats to the left and three seats
to the right of it._

So this only works with 50% occupancy? 120/(40*(3+3))

~~~
atarashi
Well, ABC's blurb is wrong. The model assumes 20 rows, not 40.

<http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0802/0802.0733v2.pdf>

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evanjacobs
Imagine an airplane whose ceiling opened up to reveal a completely empty
cabin. These planes could be parked underneath their gates at airports. At the
gate itself would be the entire cabin (seats, overhead storage, etc.) as a
complete unit which could be accessed by the passengers at any time before
departure. At departure time, the floor of the gate opens, the cabin is
lowered into the waiting plane and the ceiling of the plane closes.

That would be the fastest way to load a plane.

~~~
dreish
I think if the boarding area contained a large vacuum chamber, and the plane
cabin were heavily pressurized before docking, explosive decompression could
be used to remove all passengers, or their remains, from the cabin in a
fraction of a second. A similar technique could be used to load the plane.

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danw
People like to stay in groups, splitting a group of friends or a family who
are in the same aisle into seperate boarding parties is unlikely to work.

Trying to find another article on the subject which showed not allocating
seats and allowing a free for all was almost as effective as this tactic.

~~~
cedsav
Exactly, my 4 year old isn't going to wait all by himself until it's his turn
to get seated.

~~~
mojombo
This was addressed in the article. It states "The outcome is fairly robust in
the sense that it's relatively insensitive to deviations from it, say, because
of couples or families being seated together." During ticket purchase,
families could be noted as such and all given the lowest group number amongst
them.

~~~
gaius
Traveling Ryanair or other budget airlines, you get a "sequence number" which
is the order in which you've checked in, theoretically this is also the order
in which you board (seating is unassigned). But then you get there and they
say "families traveling with children board first" and as this is an Irish
airlines that's, umm, everyone but me. Which is understandable perhaps if
people want to sit together, but hey, didn't I pay for my ticket too? So if
you're going to have a free for all then do that, don't sneak in seating
policies by the back door!

~~~
jrockway
The good news is that exit rows are desirable, and children and their keepers
are prohibited (in the US, anyway) from sitting in them. So they can pre-board
all they want, and not take away any of the good seats.

(Of course, people are idiots. The one time I flew Southwest, I was on standby
and boarded last -- the only remaining seat was an exit row. I was amazed.)

~~~
arebop
I recently flew Southwest and sat in an exit row. The flight attendant came by
to give her spiel, and the 100 pound young woman sitting next to me expressed
doubt that she could lift 50 pounds. I think it took about 5 minutes of
pleading(!) with the rest of the completely full plane to find a volunteer to
change seats with her.

------
aardvarkious
A sort of related anecdote: one time I was on a plane where there was some
sort of medical emergency in the back, so we had to wait to let paramedics get
on. Eventually they had the patient stabilized but needed to do more work
before he could be moved, so they allowed the plane to be unloaded as long as
the aisles could be cleared quickly if they needed to get through. In order to
allow this, the crew only let one row at a time to stand up. I wish I would've
timed how long it took, but it was definitely much shorter than the time it
usually takes to get off when there is no organization.

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pc
The problem with these proposals is that the passengers' incentives aren't
aligned with the airline's. I sit and read a magazine or surf the internet
until everyone else has boarded, which minimizes time spent queueing, and that
spent in the plane itself. (Of course, this isn't a sustainable strategy for
everyone to adopt.)

~~~
jrockway
It depends. If you have a big carry-on, it is in your best interests to get in
the plane as quickly as possible, so you don't have to gate-check your bag.
This is why first class and elites get to board before everyone else, even if
they'd rather be surfing the intarwebs.

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aneesh
This won't work, because individuals have different incentives than the
airline. The individual wants to board early so that there is plenty of space
for his/her bag in the overhead bins, and also wants to board at the same time
as family/friends. It's only the airline that wants the "efficient" boarding.

Now add this to the fact that zones are almost never enforced: regardless of
what's on my boarding pass, I usually just go when they call "Zone 1" or Zone
2". They've always just let me through without a comment.

------
davidw
I hate flying, and in terms of plane loading, I think the best strategy is to
get loaded prior to boarding the damn thing.

------
jessewmc
The problem with boarding planes is that people completely ignore when they're
supposed to board and immediately line up as soon as boarding starts.

I fly all the time and as soon as boarding starts for the last N rows more
than half of the passengers line up, in a completely random fashion. It's as
if people are unnerved by waiting while other people are boarding, even though
everyone has a specific seat.

People would have to be trained into some form of orderly boarding before
improving on the theory has a hope of helping.

~~~
mojombo
Luckily, people are easily trained by enforcing the rules. If airlines
actually enforced zone rules, people would learn that it's easier to obey them
than to chance the hangup they would cause by a failed attempt to cheat them.

~~~
jrockway
I don't think the average person flies frequently enough to really get a feel
for the rules. They hear "my flight is boarding" and feel like the flight will
leave without them if they don't hang around the gate. Even I get a little
worried when I arrive after boarding has begun (and I fly at least once a
month).

The demographic that flies frequently enough to learn the rules probably
already has elite status, and gets to board first anyway.

(I imagine there is a small number of people that fly frequently, know they
need to beat the rush to get their carry-on stowed, but for some reason don't
have elite status. Maybe enforcing the rules would train these people -- but
there's really no incentive for them to not break the rules, so they will
probably try anyway.)

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leelin
Ah, but the algorithm only optimizes queue'ing up the plane cabin, when in
fact we should optimize the entire queue + dequeue.

I only skimmed the PDF, but I think it overlooks one side benefit from loading
a plane back-to-front as airlines do today: Your carry-on bag is very likely
to end up near you or in front of you, even on a very packed flight.

The benefit is, when getting off the plane, which is always done front-to-back
(and is probably optimal or close to it), everyone can grab their carry-on on
their way down the aisle. If your carry-on ever ends up BEHIND your seat in
the aisle, then generally you must wait until EVERYONE else gets off (it
happened to me once, and that's when I suddenly realized why each flight has
people who seem ready to go but must wait patiently for the entire aisle to
clear).

With the proposed algorithm in the PDF, if you are in an odd-numbered aisle
seat, you might just have to go all the way to the back to find spare carry-on
space, which is a great disaster for the deplaning part. Why is there space in
the back? Because when people book their seats, my personal observation shows
they tend to pick the back last... I guess they don't want to be near the
bathrooms.

------
toddml
The suggested method isn't going to work for families and couples with
adjacent seats.

If the primary impediment to rapid boarding is cargo stowage, it seems like it
would make sense to focus efforts on developing an alternative carry-on cargo
stowage system.

------
randallsquared
I took a coupla air trips recently, and in all four cases, the boarding took
less than 30 minutes. Reducing that to 5 minutes seems essentially impossible,
since some families would take more than 5 minutes by themselves.

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indiejade
How about doubling the number of entrances/exits on a plane: have one on the
front that boards the first half of the plane and one on the back that boards
the rear half of the plane? I'm sure there would be some way to "thread"
passengers once they all go past ticketcheck, perhaps with a re-engineered
variant of something like: Rows 1-20 to the left and Rows 21-40 to the right.
Only potential families sitting in rows 20-21 would have to be separated at
boarding time, but they'd meet right back up in the middle of the airplane.

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tptacek
Southwest has the lowest turnaround times in the industry, and they have
essentially no load order (the A-B-C groups just determine who gets to pick
seats first).

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russell
"it turns out that the best method (one of several more or less equivalent
methods) calls for passengers in even-numbered window seats near the back of
the plane to board first", followed by even middle, even front, and odd rows
int same order.

I think I would be very annoyed if I arrived first and was the last to board,
but the article says that its method is 6x faster than the current method.

~~~
aardvarkious
Why? I intentionally get on the plane as late as I possibly can.

~~~
jmtulloss
That doesn't work so well with a carry-on on a full flight.

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pedalpete
This is a perfect example of where a computer fails to interpret the
intricacies of real life.

For reasons such as groups sitting together, too many divisions, etc.

Planes have rear and front doors. Why don't we start by just splitting people
into front and back and filling in from the middle - assuming this really is
an issue which needs to be solved.

~~~
tlrobinson
Do people really care if they're split up for 10 minutes while boarding? In
the case of families with kids, they're allowed to board early anyway.

And I've seen planes loaded from the front and back before.

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dhughes
When I saw "load" in the title I thought cargo not people.

I think a great way to unload cargo is like a bomber, have the cargo in pods
and just drop it into a special cargo zone and then let a truck transport it
from there. Meanwhile the plane goes and drops more cargo and then back to the
airport to reload.

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mtrichardson
"Even random boarding would be faster."

That would be pretty fun.

I wonder about families boarding, though. It seems like the proposed solution
would fall apart fairly often. Families often sit together and want to board
at the same time.

(also, thank you so much for submitting the print version)

------
AndrewWarner
The biggest problem with this proposal is that the airline industry's only
interest is finding ways to cut costs. (And that's because price is pretty
much the only thing we consider when we buy tickets.)

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awad
Might work for strictly business-folk serving lines? If groups still sit next
to each other anyway, they can deal with the wait I think.

------
Flemlord
More doors.

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Silentio
Sounds like a job for Myth Busters.

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schammy
In theory I guess it sounds good, but I don't see it working at all. This
would create 18 seperate groups of passengers, and unless they're already in
line in the right order, there's no way this would be faster. When they call
your zone to board, it usually takes a few minutes for every person in taht
zone just to get in line. Multiply that by 18 and there's no fucking way this
saves any time.

~~~
ja2ke
I could see this working very well for Southwest, though, for instance, as
they already have everyone pre-line up not only by lettered zones, but also in
groups of five within those zones (eg "B 15-20") at most every Southwest gate
they service.

Instead of milling around the gate in the 15 minutes before boarding, they get
everyone where they're supposed to go, and then funnel them through the door
single file, in order. As the article references, though, it breaks down into
a clogged jam-up of humanity trying to stuff their carry-ons into the
compartment the moment you get to the plane.

~~~
chengmi
I'm not sure this would work very well with Southwest because they don't
assign seat numbers to passengers (at least in my experience). Most of the
time, the people at the front of the group choose seats toward the front of
the plane and hold up everyone else while they're stowing their bag.

