Speeding up boarding times

Boarding from the rear is an idea whose time has passed. In the Wall Street Journal article Plane Geometry: Scientists Help Speed Boarding of Aircraft (subscription required) reporter Nicholas Zamiska describes how America West uses science to save money and help flyers save time.

Forget the now-discredited “board the rear seats first” scenario. On America West, window coach seats in the middle and rear of the plane are loaded first. Then they gradually fill out the plane, giving priority to those with window or rear seats, then those seated along aisles in the front are finally allowed to board. This all comes from the mind of Menkes van den Briel, an industrial engineer at Arizona State University who says this issue posed a “nonlinear assignment problem with quadratic and cubic terms in the objective function.”

Part of the slow load may be cultural. According to the article, Willy-Pierre Dupont, an Airbus cabin engineer, once “watched over 500 passengers on a Japan Airlines domestic flight in Japan disembark in six minutes flat. A new group of travelers was completely boarded and seated within an additional 25 minutes. The same turnaround in the U.S. or Europe could take as long as an hour and a half, Mr. Dupont says.”

Maybe those in Japan make a point of efficiency, and so they hustle to get their bags stowed and get seated asap. My experience is that most domestic U.S. flights are filled with people that seem totally confused by the intricacies of overhead bin technology and also feel they need to maximize valuable “aisle time” as they get aboard.

“Mr Type A” here has an idea. They ought to test letting each able-bodied passenger board one at a time and timing how long it takes them individually to get stowed and seated. The winner gets some free miles, and the loser is let off the plane last…