Groups of passengers wait at a United Airlines gate to board a flight in separate numbered lanes at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. For airlines, every minute that a plane sits at the gate makes it more likely that the flight will be late, hurting the carrier’s on-time rating and causing passengers to miss connecting flights. But the perfect boarding process remains elusive. Even an astrophysicist couldn’t figure it out.DALLAS – Getting people on and off an airplane quickly is so complicated that even an astrophysicist couldn’t figure it out.
Jason Steffen, a research fellow at Northwestern University, normally contemplates things such as axion-like particles. But after waiting in one boarding line too many, he turned to the mysteries of airline seating.
“I thought there had to be a better way,” he says.
So, after a series of calculations, he deduced that the best system would be a combination of filling all the window seats first, then all the middle ones and then the aisle ones, while also having the passengers board every other row.
There was just one problem — passengers would have to board in precise order. Good luck with that. These are the same passengers who don’t turn off their phones even after they’re told it’s a federal law.