



Video: How to board a plane more efficiently

In the “Steffen” method, every other row of window seats on one side of the plane boards first, starting from the back, followed by their counterparts on the other side of the plane. The remaining window seats are then filled on each side in turn, then the middle seats and lastly the aisles (Image: Jason Steffen)

It’s something every airline passenger must think as they jostle past and clamber over their fellow flyers to find their seat: There has got to be a better way.

Now a test carried out on a mock plane used in Hollywood movies seems to have found it. Instead of boarding passengers in blocks of rows at a time, from the back to the front of the plane, as many airlines do, the new method – which takes about half the time – has only one person from a given row take their seat at a time.


Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, came up with the method in 2008 after running computer simulations to find the most efficient boarding technique.

The simulations showed that the best way was to board every other row of window seats on one side of the plane, starting from the back, then do the mirror image on the other side. The remaining window seats on the first side would follow, again starting from the back; then their counterparts on the second side; followed by the same procedure with middle seats and lastly aisles (see illustration).

The method is similar, but more detailed, than a suggestion put forward in 2006 by Eitan Bachmat and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Hollywood set

In Steffen’s computer models, the strategy minimised traffic jams in the aisle and allowed multiple people to stow their luggage simultaneously. “It spread people out along the length of the aisle,” Steffen says. “They’d all put their stuff away and get out of the way at the same time.”

Steffen published his model in the Journal of Air Transport Management in 2008, then went back to his “day job” searching for extrasolar planets. He mostly forgot about the plane study until this May, when he received an email from Jon Hotchkiss, the producer of a new TV show called “This vs That.”

“It’s a show that answers the kinds of scientific questions that come up in people’s everyday life,” Hotchkiss says. He wanted to film an episode addressing the question of the best way to board a plane, and wanted Steffen on board as an expert commentator. Steffen jumped at the chance: “I said, hey, someone wants to test my theory? Sure!”

They, along with 72 volunteers and Hollywood extras, spent a day on a mock plane that has been used in movies such as Kill Bill and Miss Congeniality 2.

Seat interferences

They ran the participants through five different boarding methods: traditional back-to-front, in which passengers boarded in a specified order starting with the rear right corner of the plane; boarding in blocks of four rows each from back to front; the so-called “Wilma” method (all window passengers first, in no particular order, then middle, then aisle); the “Steffen” method; and boarding randomly.

Surprisingly, the block boarding method – one of the most common methods used in real airports – was the worst. It took the passengers 6 minutes and 54 seconds to fill up the airplane.

That method fared worst because of the number of times passengers had to climb over each other to get to their seats in the same row. “In blocks, every passenger has one-and-a-half persons you have to climb over,” on average, Steffen says. “Those seat interferences are what pushed them over the top. It turned out they were more important than I anticipated.”

Even random boarding fared better than blocks or back-to-front, at just 4 minutes, 44 seconds. The Steffen method emerged as the clear winner at 3 minutes, 36 seconds.

Less idling

“My model made the correct prediction, and I think it made it by a comfortable enough margin that I think the results are going to stand,” Steffen says.

The study “provides a much closer representation of airplane boarding than any computer simulation can ever achieve”, says Menkes van den Briel, an optimisation expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “It is also good to know that their results are in line with the results from computer simulations that have been developed.”

Steffen says shaving minutes off boarding time could save airlines millions of dollars per year by cutting the time planes spend idling at the terminal.

But will real passengers – who often travel in groups or with small children – actually be willing to use the most orderly queue? “I believe that implementing our boarding method would actually be less trouble than many people might fear,” Steffen says.

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1108.5211