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Airlines Won't Dare Use the Fastest Way to Board Planes (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes: You've arrived at the airport early. You have already selected the perfect seat. You've employed all possible tricks for making the check-in and security processes zoom by. But there's still some blood-pressure-raising chaos you can't avoid: boarding. From impatient fellow travelers who are determined to beat you onto the plane to passengers who insist on jamming their too-big carry-ons into overhead bins, making your way to your seat can be straight-up hellish -- and Wired's Alex Davies offers up a cheery explanation of why the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. It's not that airlines aren't trying. In fact, United is in the middle of a months-long test at LAX that involves splitting its five groups of passengers into two lines, instead of five, to see whether that will make boarding less painful. But there are some basic measures that airlines could be taking to speed things up -- offering free baggage check, for instance, or cutting down on early boarding perks -- if they weren't so worried about their bottom lines. "The question for the airlines, then, is not how to get everyone onto a plane as quickly as possible," Davies writes. "It's how to get everyone onto a plane as quickly as possible while still charging them extra for bags, doting on the regular customers, and maintaining the system that, like all class structures, serves whoever built it."
Honestly, except for needing to stuff an oversize bag in the overhead no one should want to be crammed into the stuffy airborne-infection-enabling metal tube any sooner than absolutely necessary to take off on time. Yet so many seem to treat it like trying to grab a seat on the subway.
That's the only reason I want to board quicker.
If I'm first on, I get to place my bag close to me. If I'm last on, I have to place my bag frequently far from my seat. I always carry my luggage carry on. I'm rarely gone for more than a week (and I can get a week's clothes in carry on). I don't want to pay extra to check luggage, so I get the maximum carryon size allowed (I do check), and I stuff it full.
Usually though, routes I fly, they check my "carry on" free at the gate because flights are always overcrowded and they give free checking to people at the gate. I don't remember the last flight I had where they didn't check for free at the gate. I laugh at the suckers who paid to check their baggage. :)
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Lots of airline do load back to front and it's not a very good method. Mythbusters even did an episode on boarding a plane. They determined the best way to board is how Southwest does it. No assigned seats and random boarding. Back to front is often times not much better than many other methods because because it makes boarding a serial process. In other words, only one person can put their luggage in the overhead space and sit at a time. Anytime you do this, it really slows down the boarding. With Southwest's method, for example, there's a much greater chance that several people can be doing that at once. If you must have assigned seating, then a good method is to load in zones where each zone has people spread throughout the plane, at least a couple rows apart. Then, you have a better chance of more than one person being able to load their luggage and sit at once.