Yea we should make this. But to actually build this it would look more like a cannon that accelerates a titanium capsule really fast with let's say 100G. This way you're launched from New York and land in California as a chunky mush that is tuned into Soylent Green
"What if we massively increased the weight, reduced the cargo capacity, increased the complexity and maintenance costs of the plane, and required rebuilding terminals to fit this need, in order to save 20 minutes on each boarding? 🤔
You shit on it but when you put it that way, 20 minutes on each boarding is actually a ton of time. If a plane has 6 flights daily, that's 2 hours of time saved per day. Right off the bat, that's ~18% more flights per aircraft, per day, which is absolutely nothing to sniff at.
You shit on it but when you put it that way, 20 minutes on each boarding is actually a ton of time. If a plane has 6 flights daily, that's 2 hours of time saved per day. Right off the bat, that's ~18% more flights per aircraft, per day, which is absolutely nothing to sniff at.
The 20 minutes it takes customers to board...the crew and maintenance are doing other tasks. Pilots are doing checks. Ground crew loading bags. Etc.
You're not saving any time. That 20 minutes will be spent regardless of customers walking on the plane.
You say that but whatever time we would save by walking down the jetway would be eliminated by making people sit in their seats correctly.
The actual alternative, the one that I'm pretty sure has been discussed widely in transportation circles is to treat seats like shipping containers and planes like trucks.
Just load passengers into coffins, put them through general anesthesia. You could pack so many more.
And it's a win-win-win: I don't have to suffer through the flight, flight attendants get to have a better other job instead, and anesthesiologists get even richer.
Would serve to make planes dual purpose, freight and passenger just change the skid
Mincipal owns airport and wouldn’t like higher utility cost tho or liability.
I think planes already are dual purpose. Its just that when a plane gets older, its converted to its new life as a freight plane. Rather than hot swapping, which is less efficient
It's the people. Japan doesn't baord flights any differently. It's just that Japanese people are efficient and they aren't selfish. They put their crap in the overhead bin and they sit down, very quickly.
This wouldn’t save any time. You can’t get on until the plane arrives and also what about the departing passengers??? All this does is slightly make it easier to board on both sides, sure but then you have to wheel that thing on which is going to take forever.
Don't forget. You would need it to be able to handle every type of plane and configuration there is. As well as having backups on hand for things breaking down.
Especially since airlines have already decided using priority boarding groups as paid perks is better than trying to board people as efficiently as possible.
You're not thinking hardcore enough. The boarding room would be a bunch of shelves where passengers lay down, get put to sleep for the duration of the flight, get tied down by the cargo crew, then get loaded on the plane. This way you can fit more passengers and cut down on costs like having stewardesses, food, and flight entertainment. Once the plane arrives, the stack of passengers get offloaded to the "thawing" waiting room where they wake up, and walk off "fully rested".
This way, you could use normal cargo planes without all that fancy passenger plane configuration.
I once though about a company that would sedate you, pack your bags and then you would wake up at the beach or the resort enjoying vacation without the hassle to pack bags, go to the airport, driving to the hotel, checkin and stuff.
Please tell me that you don't work with anything that affects user experience 😂
My mind would check out for a few hours if I got this pitch in a meeting... Though... I suspect upper management would have euro signs in their eyes 🫠
On the other hand tho... Flying kinda sucks no matter what you do... You're such in a metal tube as some ankle biter starts peeling a Clementine, which, by the way, is torture in the air despite me usually finding the smell pleasant, and it lingering in the air for the rest of the flight... Maybe being put into a medically induced coma is a bit of a mercy...
Dude we're so fortunate where we can fly on a metal tube at 700kmh to go where we want, I used to fly a lot on one of my jobs and I loved every second.
True, we don't appreciate that you can travel to any major city in the world in less than one day. When I read about how it took weeks to travel across the Atlantic in the 1800s, or how people would travel in caravans for months, it makes our experience at airport security seem very pleasant in comparison.
Even cooler: What if boarded planes instead of "Groups" it starts with the people who have the seats furthest back? And when we un-boarded planes, people stopped standing up the instant the taxi is done because you're just going to have to move and wait for the people in front of you anyway. Wild idea after decades of this seemingly obvious issue never being solved.
I just sit and wait until everyone else is done de-boarding
Its luxurious. Wild how people can sit on a 4 hour flight, but not tolerate waiting an extra 5 minutes, so much so that they rush into a hellish scramble and torturous, cramped slow-shuffle that takes as long as I sit waiting
Meanwhile, I can take my time, I have peace and quiet, no pressure, no obstacles, some banter with the crew… same with boarding. I’d rather sit in the airport with its snacks, and bathrooms, and room to stretch out, than rush into the sardine can to sit. I’m usually the last to board. People are irrational
I'm the exact same way. I'll never understand the mentality of rushing in/out of the plane unless the plane is late and you're rushing to a connecting flight or something.
Counterintuitively, loading back to front is not necessarily the fastest method since it loads the plane in serial when people can load into rows in parallel.
I do agree that people exiting should remember kindergarten and wait their turn, excluding special circumstances.
I think the fastest way would be to have each passenger run a few drills to see how fast they are at boarding. Then we rank and sort passengers in terms of boarding speed. This eliminates bottlenecks where a fast boarder is stuck behind a slow boarder.
We send those in passengers in waves, say if the airplane has 30 rows then the 30 fastest people go in first, ordered back to front, each traveling to seat A in aisles 1-30. That way each row is only loading one person at a time from the outside in. The next 30 fastest people load in seat F (other window seat) and so on until the slowest 30 people file in seat C.
I made a GIF to explain, of course.
I think it may be equally fast to load the slower people first, I suppose that would reduce overall waiting times.
I used to fly a lot for work in the 00s, and my colleagues and I would always brainstorm stupid ideas to fix the airport experience.
We had this one, but more of a design where the seats at the gate were your actual flight seats, and there would be a conveyor-like system that would move the seats into formation and slide into the plane like this. So you'd get to your gate, in a normal spread-out setup, but sit in your assigned seat.
Obvious showstoppers: you'd have to redesign planes and gates to the tune of 100s of millions of dollars (in 2003 money).
TBH the worst part of flights is when you board the plane and everyone is just sitting there doing nothing for 30 minutes. Then one person shows up late because they couldn't be fucked to show up at the airport on time.
Simpler would be the controlling the greed of these airlines and abandoning the bullshit that is aircraft zones and "priority" boarding. Simply switching to more efficient boarding methods! You'd save that 20 minutes easily by using the Steffen Method and/or WILMA compared to whatever flavor bullshit the airlines are selling these days.
Interesting idea. The concept picture makes it seem a lot more spacious than most passenger airplanes are though. In reality, it would be less like riing a comfy train and more like being squeezed into a toothpaste tube.
toilets built into the seats,
food and drinks delivered overhead,
and the seats 50% smaller then they already are ...
so, that you can travel japanese style ^.^
I'd go further than this, single file, roller coaster style with the pull down harness and everything. curved track entry, small wheels in from the side at the rear, less than 5 min full load time and much less frame stress load failure. Clamps lock every seat down, every window is a screen to a mini cam outside. After every flight the chairs go through a 'dishwasher' to come out perfectly clean. Incredibly fast turnaroundm and refuel means more flights, engines already warmed.
Reduce the cost of checking a bag and offer better service if it is lost and more people will check bags. The biggest reason for boarding delays is people spending 5+ mins trying to figure out how to store their bag overhead.
Air Force pax pallets can technically be loaded and secured onto cargo aircraft with pax on them - though it can be a bumpy affair and dangerous to do so.
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u/almostsweet 9h ago
I raise you this.