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Comment by sdfhbdf | Hacker News Reader

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I mean it all sounds fun but when you consider for example low-cost airlines in Europe (WizzAir, Ryanair) they’re really efficient without any of this, since their margins depend on it. Surprisingly their boarding isn’t as structured (only priority and then the rest) and they still only take around 30 mins total from first to last passengers being let through a gate in my experience. Their trick is probably some combination of motivated passengers, asking people to put stuff under the seat in from, remote stands that need a bus and flight attendants constantly announcing „please don’t block the aisle”.

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Having not one more carry-on/roll-aboard than will fit in the overhead compartments is easily the most important thing to get right. Making the passengers pay for that space is the key.

This also explains why many airlines do the boarding group thing: because it rewards the frequent flyers with access to overhead bin space!

That's the reason that people want to board first!

So why not just charge for overhead bin space? Because it's unseemly and -anyways- hard to get right.

Ryanair charges for that - small bag included in the price, additional carry-on is extra.

Yeah, I know. But in the U.S. that seems somehow culturally verboten.

I flew Aer Lingus recently and the flight had exactly that: 1 free item of checked luggage, pay for hand luggage (except an under-the-seat-in-front-of-you personal item).

It worked great except that the bag-check process was absolutely terrible: every passenger had to go to the desk outside security. But other airlines have solved that issue (separate check-in and self-service-tag-printing+bag-drop-only queues make a big difference).

The thing I find funny about WizzAir/Ryanair is that because they have bundled the larger cabin bags with their priority boarding, when you show up, about 90% of the people are in the so called priority boarding queue.

If everyone has priority, no one has priority.

In my experience (and I just flew yesterday), about 30% of people were in the priority queue.

Passengers should compete to leetcode a priority queue in order to get to board first.

> they still only take around 30 mins total from first to last passengers being let through a gate

Compare to the Shinkansen (bullet train) in Japan which loads 3x the number of people in 2-3 minutes

Not particularly feasible to have planes with 8-12 doors on one side, though.

many planes have 4 doors per side yet they only use 1 to load

Ryanair generally also boards from _both sides_; in airports which require an air bridge and thus don’t allow this, they’re somewhat slower.

> Surprisingly their boarding isn’t as structured (only priority and then the rest) and they still only take around 30 mins total from first to last passengers being let through a gate in my experience.

What's surprising about that? That's how you do quick boarding. Southwest has always done it that way. They start boarding 30 minutes before departure. And stop 10 minutes before.

What the long boarding line accomplishes is that it forces people to wait in a long line, which you can charge them to skip. Think of it as a mobile game with microtransactions, but for airplanes.

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