It’s an inevitable scene in any airport terminal: as soon as the boarding announcement sounds through the loudspeakers and appears on the screens, all passengers stand up as one man and wait one behind the other. Most often, everyone then enters the cabin in disorder, regardless of their seat number.
As Slate.fr explains, this first method is one of the most common. Some airlines are opting for another way of doing this: first install the passengers in the background and then go forward. But the problem is the same: the passengers annoy each other, especially those who want to access the place near the window, while the middle seat is already occupied.
So there is a way to make it even more efficient. And it was a physicist by the name of Jason Steffen who found the solution a few years ago. “Steffen has developed the optimal boarding method, making boarding 4 to 10 times faster than the slowest method, depending on the size of the aircraft” can we read in an article published in 2008 on phys.org.
Order and method
The principle is simple: bring in 10 passengers at a time, every other row. We start with the seats where the window is on the left, before moving to those in the right row. If the airplane has a middle row, these seats are filled in the third place, starting with the ones on the left. In this way, all passengers can put down their bags and suitcases without disturbing each other.
Is this really a good idea? The American TV show Mythbusters took the test in 2014. And the result is clear: it is better to start with all those who have a window, then move on to those seated in the middle and finally the passengers on the aisle. Which, basically, seems rather logical. In this configuration, boarding takes approximately 15 minutes and the 200 passengers who participated in the test were very satisfied.
This change in air travel habits seems to be gaining ground. Last October, Gatwick Airport, near London, announced a test phase “to save time and avoid queues at the boarding gates“.
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