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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I don't know any that are front and back these days--at least using jet bridges which is just about any major airport. But it's common on certain wide-bodies to have separate doors for First/Business and the various economy classes.

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I was recently on a Norwegian.com flight and they boarded both in the front (using a jet bridge) and at the back (using stairs)

I haven't seen that in years. I think it was 727s used to do that pre-jet bridges. But I guess some models in some airports can still do that.

Ryanair and wizz air has had front and backboarding on like 90% of all my flights the last couple of years.

I’ve seen this more in Europe than US. In US it seems like only the larger planes doing intercontinental flights will sometimes have front and back boarding, but I attribute that just to the shear amount of people to load into the aircraft.

As I said in another comment, it's not even front and back--it's business class and economy. (Both from the front.) I'm pretty sure I haven't seen back boarding in a US (or for that matter European or Asian) airport, given the airlines I generally fly, in probably decades.

It’s quite common in Europe, at least on budget airlines. EasyJet, Norwegian, Ryanair all do it. I’ve also had back boarding on domestic flights in India. I know in Europe it’s literally because the airports charge extra for using the jetway and the budget airlines, not wanting to pay that, have everyone on the tarmac anyway so why not just toss another stairway up and get people on faster. This is especially true when the weather is garbage and they don’t want some tweet from someone complaining about having to stand forever in the queue in the freezing rain to get on their plane when there’s a perfectly good back door sitting there.

I’ve lived in the USA for most of my life and I don’t think I’ve ever done back boarding, and have perhaps deplaned from the back once. It’s very rare here.

It’s quite crazy to me that people don’t do back boarding more often, but perhaps the YouTube comment on the CGPGrey video above was telling: a pilot said that boarding isn’t actually the bottleneck, it’s getting everyone’s checked baggage on board. So even after everyone is taking forever to board there’s still more to wait on, so why would airlines even bother to make it faster when it’s not the real bottleneck.

Yeah, I hear a lot of "We're waiting for our final paperwork," "We just have a few passengers from a connecting flight," etc. It doesn't usually seem like a lot of "Will you slowpokes just get into your damned seats so we can take off."

I don't think the budget Airlines care about press...

But what they do care is turnaround time, and minimising boarding and deboarding is effective in making it shorter. Whole goal of such airlines is to fit as many flights in regular day as they can. And cutting some minutes or tens of minutes is effective for them.

Indeed, Ryanair is kind of notorious about using “bad” press as advertisement. Every year or so there’s a new story about how they are ostensibly going to start charging to use the restroom or make people stand up in exchange for even cheaper tickets

Ah. I've never flown any of the budget airlines. It makes sense they'd prioritize speeding boardings whatever it takes.

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