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Published online 27 February 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/4511040a
Strict ordering slashes tarmac time
Physicist identifies fastest way to board aircraft.
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While this may reveal the fastest way to get random particles aboard an aircraft, families, freinds, and people you meet while standing in a terminal are unlikely to behave in this irrelevant manner. Boarding is about grouping and about status
Yet a more logical solution might be to first board those passengers having larger carry-on items (larger than a notebook-sized bag). These take the longest to sit down, especially if boarding late and having to move items in the overhead stow compartments. It would make sense for airlines to offer special bonuses – such as extra mileage points – for those passengers not carrying anything larger than a notebook sized bag. David Gurwitz Tel-Aviv University
It seems that the primary problem to address is the variables involved and the main assumptions that can be made. What are the non-dimensional numbers governing this problem and what is the distribution of the results. For example, are the chronically late (who must be waited for due to Federal Law) the driving force for delays in the total boarding time? What are the metrics of importance and why? With this first step, then we can choose a technique and suggest results. This does not go far enough to claim what is BEST. It would be nice to know the uncertainties on the various methods that were tried here. How significant is a factor of 7? Is it 7 +/- 6 or 7 +/- 0.1 or 7 +/- 14?
Eitan Bachmat of Ben-Gurion University in Israel has pointed out the following: “The strict boarding policies that Steffen discusses were first considered in a paper by H. Van Landeghem and A. Beuselinck (“Reducing passenger boarding times in airplanes, European Journal of Operational Research 142, 294-308, 2002). They call such policies "by seat" policies. Steffen's preferred boarding method is essentially the same as a policy which they call alternate(1) row and alternate letter. In their study, this was not the best policy but rather a related one in which passengers were boarded without back-to-front by row by letter. The reason for the difference is due to a difference between the papers in the setting of a certain parameter which needs to be inserted into the simulation, based on observations. Steffen's parameter value is larger, but otherwise the simulations, the policies and the conclusions are very similar. Van Landeghem and Beuselinck and other researchers have raised concerns that it will be difficult to enforce such strict policies, so most of the research gravitated to group boarding with a fairly small number of groups. Perhaps Steffen's main contribution is his optimism regarding strict boarding methods and also his simulations regarding stability. I do think however that Van Landeghem and Beuselinck already did most of the work and should get some well deserved credit.� I’ve not been able to get hold of the paper myself yet, but it does thus sound as though this line of enquiry has been pursued before. Eitan’s remark about the feasibility of such a strict boarding policy, with each person given a specific place in the queue, is interesting. My original draft of the article addressed this, pointing out that Southwest Airlines in the US already operate such a scheme in which, in effect, every passenger is assigned a specific place in the queue. They do it for another reason, however: Southwest has unassigned seating, but they find that passenger anxiety is eased, and the scrum for seats reduced, with this policy. It turns out that it also slightly reduces boarding times by reducing congestion at the gates. So there seems to be no fundamental reason to doubt that Steffen’s ‘ideal’ scheme can be implemented.
Menkes van den Briel at Arizona State University has also done some interesting work in this area. I hope he won't mind me directing you to his website, which you can find easily through google. You can get a copy of Van Landeghem & Beuselinck's paper there.