NED LEVI watched in amazement as a passenger grunted down the aisle with five bags on a recent flight from Philadelphia to Seattle. "I was surprised she could even walk," said Mr. Levi, a computer consultant from Philadelphia. "I was even more surprised that the flight attendants didn't try to stop her." His remedy for the endless boarding delays that plague airlines these days: enforce luggage limits.

Sounds reasonable, but United Airlines says it believes it has hit on a better solution. It recently announced a logistics ploy it calls Wilma -- shorthand for window-middle-aisle -- that it claims will cut boarding times by four to five minutes, an eternity in the industry's on-time takeoff sweepstakes. The idea is to fill the window seats in economy class first, then the middle seats, then the aisle seats, thereby eliminating the free-for-all chaos that clogs the cabin when passengers are sent in by row numbers.

Not to pick on United, because it is, after all, flying under bankruptcy protection and Wilma could save it millions a year. But hasn't this already been tried?

Yes, it has. The now-defunct Shuttle by United tried it a decade ago, according to Michael J. Boyd, an airline consultant for the Boyd Group in Evergreen, Colo. Back then, he called it the product of "a deranged M.B.A." He feels the same way today. "It's not going to change anything," he said. "These initiatives sound good, until it becomes clear that you are boarding humans, and not cattle. The cattle will line up and get into a pen. People won't."