Airplane boarding simulations

None of these simulations seem to take into account the usual activities that delay boarding:

* Not all of first class boards early, many flyers stay in the lounge till later and then hold up the aisle getting their bag into the overhead

* Passengers board together regardless of boarding order. Friends flying with an elite member can board early and not with their group.

* When the overhead is full passengers must swim upstream to bring their bag to be checked.

* Although there are plenty of bathrooms near the gate, many passengers insist on using the lav the minute they board. They again end up swimming upstream holding up the queue

* Seat stealing - whether intentional or not, some passengers help themselves to a roomier exit row seat (or on one occasion I've seen them in first class) hoping no one shows up to take that seat. Once the passenger with that seat arrives, the original passenger has to get their belongings, perhaps clear the overhead and again possibly fight their way against people boarding.

Southwest's self serve seating helps in some regards, but this style of boarding will never be used my the major carriers - at least in the U.S.

edit: typos

Maybe this is completely dumb and impractical, but could there be a way to remove the seats from the plane, individually or in groups, maybe on a track (overhead?) like a roller coaster, so that there could be a large boarding area with plenty of room for people to get situated. Then once everyone is in their seat, the seats would roll and lock into position.

This would also allow you to quickly deplane, but have the next group of passengers already seated, ready to slide into the plane.

The boarding problem is human, and also spacial. And you can't really get rid of the humans, but you could change the space.

Freight transport has been containerized, how can we do it to passenger transport?

Here's a clever idea I just thought of. The airline could keep the overhead bins locked while everyone boards. So everyone just comes in and sits down, keeping their belongings on their lap. (It seems like that would be a lot faster)

Then once the plane starts taxi-ing the overhead bins unlock and people can put away their belongings (since you have to wait at least ten+ minutes to taxi and take-off it seems like this wouldn't cause a slowdown.) Plus you'd get an extra efficiency because the person in the aisle can load the bags for everyone in his row.

Should I patent this ... :-/

I was bored on one flight and so I actually wrote a quick and dirty simulation while on the flight: http://blog.chewxy.com/2012/04/04/a-better-passenger-boardin... . My main complaint at the time had been the inefficiencies brought about by loading luggage in the overhead compartment.

I was actually quite surprised by the simulation - that queueing people into odd-even queues make for faster boarding.

Caveat: the code I shared on github is actually quite terrible. Ignore the code, look at the pretty charts

These simulations don't account for human choice on when they want to board. There are customers anxious to get to their seats, and so listen carefully for their zone boarding. There are customers who would rather spend time in the terminal than extra time in an upright seat so they wait until the very last minute to board, regardless of zone.

Increases in prices of checked baggage means many flights have more people carrying bags on, due to limited overhead space, there is more incentive to board as early as possible. If you don't have a carry-on that needs to go in the overhead bins, the incentive to board on-time or early is lower.

Southwest airlines, mentioned here quite a bit, incentives customers to board early (if you want a good seat, you need to get on early to choose it) and to check in early (they can better gauge % checked-in because you are rewarded for confirming with the airline 24 hours in advance). Their policy to allow free checked bags is a nice courtesy but it also means more customer check bags, reducing the time to store things in the overhead which leads to less time at the gate. Free bags is a financial play, just not in terms of additional revenue but as cost savings.

My experience (in the UK) is that the time is dominated by people being slow to put their bags away, or putting bags away then blocking the aisle while they take off jackets or getting bags back out to extract a book.

Also airlines tend to board from front and back simultaneously, which isn't always an optimization as people join the shortest queue regardless of where their seat is.

Surely airlines can just do this empirically rather than rely on simulations. Why not just A/B test a bunch of different boarding methods on different flights and time what works the best?

Stop charging fees to check bags, and start charging fees for carry-ons. Airlines should WANT checked baggage. And so should TSA.

I thought the fastest was back to front, but alternating left and right side for each row. In other words, board the left side of last 10 even rows and the right side of last 10 odd rows at the same time, then let right/even, left/odd people in, then move on to the next 10 row, etc.

There was a research paper on that few months ago, and it was on HN. Does anyone remember details?

How about this idea:

Much of the congestion is caused by people stowing their bags overhead further down the plane than their seat, then having to reverse against traffic for X rows to sit down. Also there is a large fixed time cost once the overhead bins fill up and X passengers are forced to check their bags; they have to haul them all the way to the front against traffic.

What if a system was installed at the security checkpoint that recorded whether a passenger were boarding with a suitcase, and then assigned them a bin overhead. The bins would have small LED screens that displayed the passenger's name or seat number. An algorithm would match the bins to the nearest seats, and reduce or possibly eliminate downstream luggage-stowing. It would also be able to tell passengers that they were too late, the bins were full, and they would have to check their bags.

Difficulties --

   * some bags are small or irregular, can fit 2 in a bin  (measure bag during X-ray?)

   * initially people won't understand the system leading to chaos

Most of the fail to understand that people like to board in groups based on association. eg, families like to board together. That mucks it all up.

Also, people are stupid and can't self-sort.

I must admit, Southwest's boarding always feels like the absolute easiest. You just get in line by number and sit wherever you want.

Does anyone know why back to front boarding is slower than random? That's doesn't make sense to me.

I wonder how much plane size impacts the efficiency of system, particularly in the case of the random boarding process? I flew on Southwest and American Eagle last week and thought about this for a while. On Southwest people were able to choose their seat based on their position in line, but that choice was harder for some people than others. On American Eagle (pre-assigned seats) the plane was so small (16 rows of 3) that they didn't bother with boarding order outside of priority status. People randomly tried to get to their seat on the plane, but it seemed like that was faster on a per-person basis than Southwest. Perhaps choice slows the system down?

Conceptually back-to-front seems to make the most sense, but as the simulations show it's still not efficient. So instead of plainly loading back-to-front, load back-to-front but skip rows.

That is, if there are 25 rows on the plane, load rows 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5 at once in that order, and in the second wave load 24, 19, 14, 9, 4, etc. That way, the people sitting in row 25 will have a 4 row buffer between them and the next passengers to wait while they get seated and aren't blocking the next group (in row 20) from being seated.

Does that seem reasonable?

When I board planes I wait until the last possible second - I like to hear 'last call' before I join the queues. I don't take stupidly big carry on luggage, so why would I care whether I get on first or last?

I'd rather wait as long as possible and avoid being sat on the plane.

This probably ruins carefully planned boarding procedures. C'est la vie. But as it stands, the trouble with boarding is that there are plenty of people like me.

I would like to see real boarding times, also It would be nice to see the effect that all the bigger baggage (due to the baggage fares) that it is carried aboard. This is one of the biggest drags when boarding, even more with a full airplane as the last 20 pax are not going to find enough space for their hand luggage anywhere.

Beeing sorted into groups and numbers actually make's me feel like cattle instead of an airline passenger. I like the random boarding of Southwest and most European low-fare carriers.

It does not help that a lot of American companies do not use any of these methods, they use front to back in sections.

Easy. Next time you buy a fleet, ask Boeing for planes with 10ft wide corridors instead of 2ft.