The Best Way to Board a Plane

During the 1970s, Southwest had a 10 minute turn. Flying just three airplanes, getting in and out quickly gave them the equivalent of 4 or even more.

Now their turn is closer to 42 minutes. With faster boarding, they think they can make it less.

xkcd has one solution:

Southwest has lots more possibilities.

Boarding Strategies

It’s faster to deplane and board from the front and back simultaneously. But then the rear boarding passengers have to go outside.

Southwest also discovered in their current boarding study at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport that music makes us move faster, even on a crowded jet bridge. So too does answering the questions through jet bridge signs and announcements that we ask attendants as we board. They also concluded that color-coded carpets could work (but not yellow). In addition, larger bins let us clear the aisle faster.

This is Southwest’s Random Seating:

Meanwhile, here is Back-to-Front:

The Mythbusters Experiment

How we leave and enter the plane makes a huge difference. In 1968, we deplaned 20 passengers a minute. By 1998, it was down to nine. As for boarding, the speed varies with the plan. Passengers with seats in the rear could go first. With WILMA, we would do window first, then middle seat, and last comes the aisle. Or it could be random.

To simulate different boarding systems, MythBusters did a Discovery show with a mock plane that had 173 seats. These were the times and the passenger reactions:

Sadly, the least pleasant was the fastest.

Our Bottom Line: Productivity

An economist would say that we are just trying to get more output from our land,labor, and capital. Called an increase in total factor productivity, it could let Southwest shave turn time by 3 minutes:

As a final thought, I wanted to include the following table. Copied from a past econlife post, it conveys what has to be done during the turn:

From: Boeing Aero Magazine

My sources and more: To get the whole picture, a combination of WSJ, the points guy, and USA Today are possibilities. Not including the recent meltdown, we had much more on Southwest here.