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October 18, 2005
What's the fastest way to load an airplane?
Christopher Elliot of the NY Times considers this weighty question:
United Airlines ... recently announced a logistics ploy it calls Wilma - shorthand for window-middle-aisle - that it claims will cut boarding times by four to five minutes, an eternity in the industry's on-time takeoff sweepstakes. The idea is to fill the window seats in economy class first, then the middle seats, then the aisle seats, thereby eliminating the free-for-all chaos that clogs the cabin when passengers are sent in by row numbers.
Not to pick on United, because it is, after all, flying under bankruptcy protection and Wilma could save it millions a year. But hasn't this already been tried?
Yes, it has. The now-defunct Shuttle by United tried it a decade ago, according to Michael J. Boyd, an airline consultant for the Boyd Group in Evergreen, Colo. Back then, he called it the product of "a deranged M.B.A." He feels the same way today. "It's not going to change anything," he said. "These initiatives sound good, until it becomes clear that you are boarding humans, and not cattle. The cattle will line up and get into a pen. People won't."
...
What is the fastest way to board a plane? "Back to front," said Robert W. Mann, an airline analyst in Port Washington, N.Y. That's because bottlenecks do not happen only in economy class. First-class passengers also can obstruct the boarding progress as they try reach into the overheads for their laptops or make their flight attendant run into the galley for a cocktail.
There is an economic observation to be made here. If all the airlines improve their boarding times by five minutes, I suspect that the new equilibrium would look a lot like the current one. Maybe they would all start boarding a couple minutes closer to take-off than before, but other than that, little would change. It just doesn't strike me as a money-maker.
Boarding from the back is my vote for the fastest way. The window-middle-aisle plan makes no sense. If a few window people arrive late from their connection, the time savings are lost.
Besides, if I had to guess at the ratio of minutes my flights have been delayed because of other problems (excluding weather) relative to problems in the boarding process, I'd guess that ratio to be about 20 to 1. I'd suggest some other time savings ideas--like reducing the number of keystrokes required for a ticket agent to issue a boarding pass. (Of course, I print my boarding passes on-line now, so I'm already doing my part.)
Posted by William Polley at October 18, 2005 12:10 AM
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Comments
How funny! I actually studied how to deplane (the opposite of boarding) passengers faster while at Boeing. In that case the fastest solution for a full complement of adults was "Aisle-Middle-Window," but that quickly broke down when family groups (people traveling with children) and handicapped passengers were taken into account.
If you're just going to use one door on the aircraft for boarding passengers, the back to front approach works out well, but airlines can do the job much faster if they use a passenger door located closer to the middle of the aircraft. Doing so creates two lines (in effect) which dramatically reduces the amount of time required for boarding. Kind of like opening a new checkout stand at the grocery store when the line there gets too long.
It sounds simple, but requires infrastructure expenses by the airport (a longer jetway) and ultimately depends on whether the aircraft's design permits it (you really can't put a jetway over or behind a wing, and you can only put the jetway where the doors are.)
Posted by: Ironman at October 18, 2005 8:58 AM
The constraints Ironman mentions also preclude putting first class ahead of the vestibule and steerage astern, which would keep the pre-departure beverage service out of the way of passengers simply boarding.
One of these days, the airlines will rethink some of these boarding problems, but it will take a lot of competition from high-speed trains that can board and be halfway to the next station while the passengers are still in what the airlines insist on calling "the boarding process" to do it.
Posted by: Stephen Karlson at October 18, 2005 11:55 AM
Ironman,
That does sound like the optimal way to deplane. Everyone on the aisle gets up, goes to the overhead bins, grabs their bags and exits. Repeat for the middle and the window. In practice, it often starts out that way until, as you say, it breaks down. When it starts to break down (e.g. family with 2 kids and 3 bags in the overhead bins above row 18) the middle and window seats toward the front of the airplane start to clear out until the bottleneck subsides. If you take the time to observe it, you'll see there is a certain order that emerges spontaneously.
The individual discount rates of the passengers are often revealed in the deplaning process as well, but that's another story.
Posted by: William Polley at October 18, 2005 6:05 PM
Two comments:
1. Compared to high-speed rail, planes are cheap and infinitely more flexible.
2. I didn't mention other aspects of the boarding/deplaning experience that affect the aircraft's turn time, such as carry-on baggage (what if the overhead bins above the passengers seat don't have enough space available to accommodate their bags?) There's more, but you get the idea.
Link for more info:
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_01/textonly/t01txt.html
Posted by: Ironman at October 18, 2005 6:50 PM
On point 2,
Among the bad things that can happen when the bins fill up is that the guy in row 10 has to go back to row 20 to find a suitable spot for his backpack. Upon deplaning, he imitates a salmon by swimming upstream. Oh yeah, there are a lot of things that can go wrong in the boarding/deplaning process.
Personally, I usually wait to be the last one off the plane unless I have to make a connection. I can read an extra 20 pages in whatever reading material I have brought along and chat with the pilot on the way out. Hassle free.
Cool link!
Posted by: William Polley at October 19, 2005 1:52 AM