One of the most annoying parts of air travel is boarding (and leaving) the aircraft, as it is a really messy business to move along a very narrow aisle jammed by passengers looking for their seats, organizing their stuff inside the overhead bins, moving items of hand-luggage...and the powerful incentives that low cost and, increasingly, full service airlines have put in place in order to prevent people from checking in luggage does not help to alleviate this situation.

It is not that scientists haven't looked at ways to avoid the plane-boarding problem , but maybe the solution is much simpler than that, or so thinks KLM, that has started to implement a new boarding procedure on some of its European flights.

It consists in boarding by "columns" instead of by rows, that is windows board first, then middle seats, then aisles. Passengers with special treatment (because of special needs or superior frequent flier status) are allocated numbers to board last.

If you have been on KLM flights between Amsterdam and Berlin, Budapest or Helsinki would be interesting to hear how did it go!