Allllll a-BOARD!

Regular as clockwork, some time during each summer’s travel season we get some new scientifically proven article about airplane boarding that demonstrates:

1. However we’re doing it right now, we’re doing it wrong.
2. Physicists and mathematicians don’t do a lot of air travel.

The current article making the rounds is described here (actual paper here)*. It purports to demonstrate that zone boarding (whether it’s United’s previous Zones 1-4, or most airlines “We’re now boarding rows 37-22”) and WilMA (loading windows, then middles, then aisles) are pretty lousy ways to board a plane. The randomized method (think of Southwest) does much better.

But the article also comes up with this year’s new Zany Boarding Method, zebra striping. Rather than blocks of seats, the author, Jason Steffen, suggests boarding people in 10-person groups by every other row, starting from the back. The idea is that this minimizes people trying to get past each other, or taking up aisle space (Steffen suggests that people boarding into a row take up about two rows of space while doing so).

Which sounds all interesting, until you consider how you’d actually call out people to board and the inefficiencies that would cause at the gate. Plus it’s not clear that it handles the always-significant problem of families boarding.

The fact is, everyone who travels by air has an opinion about the best way to handle boarding, and every method has serious drawbacks. Factors that drive me up the wall …

Even though I am now (gads) a priority flier on United, priority seating schemes are endlessly annoying, often pandering to ego (“First we’ll board the Platinum-Diamond Fliers, the 5-Million Mile Flyers, and the Really Wealthy and Fabulous Flyers; after that, we’ll board the Gold Flyers, then First Class, then the 1-Million Mile Flyers, then the Silver Fliers, then Business Class, then the Bronze Flyers, then the Zinc Flyers, following which we’ll start boarding the remaining couple dozen poor folk in steerage …) and complicate gate announcements crazily.

Plus these programs tend to invalidate all the other efficient seating schemes out there, and make for grumpy steerage fliers.

Which doesn’t mean I’m not going to take advantage of it while they let me, but, honestly, I wouldn’t grieve over it if it went away.

Then there are families. Families are one of the Number One Problems with getting people on-board efficiently.  For one thing, you can’t board parents in a different zone / block / column / stripe than their kids.  Nuh-uh.  So right off the bat you have (even on ostensibly business traveler flights) a huge exception to any other efficient boarding method you use.

Second, kids inevitably, even with the most (ahem) diligent and considerate of parents, slow things down.  They don’t know where to go.  They need to hit the head.  They need their toy from above.  They have their little bag stowed under their seat.  The stews need to regulate where they sit (if in a car seat). Car seats are awkward to carry and to set up.  A family bigger than three ends up with an endless shuffle back and forth of who’s sitting where and, okay, dear, let’s swap that ties up the aisle.

Ugh.  I’m really surprised that the airlines don’t have no-family flights. (And I say all of this as someone who’s flown with his daughter eleventy dozen times and tried to be as non-obstructive as possible.)

Whether you have kids or not, too many fliers look like they are carrying ten-year-olds in their ostensibly “carry-on” luggage.  It’s obviously not stuff that can go underneath the seat.  But between a personal bag, a computer bag, and a duffel bag the size of Baltimore, getting the luggage settled (and finding a spot when all the overhead bins are full, and trying to stuff a rolly bag into the bin when it’s clearly about two inches too long, and dealing with the frail granny who somehow has been wheeling that sixty-pound wheely around the airport but can’t get it up into the overheads, and …) …

I think every person who’s ever flown has cursed over some inconsiderate boob who clearly shouldn’t have tried to get that bag onto the plane.  And probably half have a sheepish memory of a (fully justified!) time when they were that boob.

But suggestions that airplanes should disallow carry-on luggage are ludicrous. Those same airlines are trying to save money (or make money) by charging extra for checked bags, which, along with the typically horrible experience in baggage claim, actually encourages carry-on.

Moreover, though nobody likes running their luggage through the TSA checkpoints, at least it’s in your hot little hands the rest of the time.  Most fliers have stories of luggage getting lost, or delayed to another flight, or being broken into.  It’s simply not practical to travel without valuables or medication or anything else you don’t dare lose or not have with you when you get to your destination.

Frontier has lit on an interesting idea, which is to give people traveling without luggage that they’re going to put in the overhead bin priority boarding.  I.e., they board all the first class / elite / hoity-toity types, then anyone in steerage that isn’t putting stuff up into the bins.  I’m not convinced that helps, though, and it certainly causes still more grumbling out in the boarding area (and studied disbelief that those folks aren’t, in fact, stuffing their man-sized duffels into the overhead bins).

So what’s the answer?  I really don’t know.  I periodically see suggestions straight out of Mechanics Illustrated of having seating modules in the boarding areas that you would get into at your leisure and that would then be loaded onto the planes.  Which sounds very 50s-60s, and is utterly impractical given the existing infrastructure (and plane technology).

I have to say that, really, I think I like Southwest’s random boarding best.  It makes for a bit more tension 24 hours before the flight (“Eek! I forgot to check in!”), but it lets folks spread out as they will, it removes all of the uncertainty about whether you should be in the queue to board (or if folks are cutting into the queue), and it eliminates fancy boarding zones and the like.  It helps that SW doesn’t have first class or business class seating (though you can now pay extra to get to the front of the queue, which irks me some).  But, aside from feeling vaguely cattle-like, I find it the most straightforward and least stressful way of boarding.

Is it faster?  So they say.  But, regardless, it seems to work. Although I’m sure in another year, some mathematician or physicist will have come up with something even fancier.

*Okay, this article isn’t entirely new.  I ran across it  on two different sites dated in the past few days. But this article in Nature, on an earlier version of the paper, is dated from 2008.