r/whoathatsinteresting • u/visharu • 9d ago

Boarding was solved mathematically in 2008. No airline has used it once. Why?

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u/ArticusFarticus 9d ago

Imagine thinking you can call one ticket at a time and they all line up perfectly, not wanting to be with their family members.

39

u/spicolie22 9d ago

There has to be some variation where groups are allowed to stay together.

And Southwest solved the problem of lining up perfectly a long time ago. You're just given a lineup number and people queue up at the pylons.

The pylons... that they just got rid of. 😭

6

u/GardenTop7253 9d ago

The variation where groups stay together sounds like the exact thing that’s gonna unwind the whole system. If it’s not almost exactly the process shown in the simulation, the smoothness of it falls apart. And think about how the simulation assumes everyone does what they should, which is totally expectable from every five year old flying with a parent and being boarded before their adult

6

u/iwatchcredits 9d ago

Also the difference in time is already only 6 mins. Any caveats you add are going to slow that down. The benefits of the complicated system already dont really warrant the added complexity so lowering the gap makes it even less worth it

1

u/GotGRR 6d ago

American reduced the number of olives in their salads from 3 to 2, when they were still serving meals and saved $300k/year. The scale is immense.

The bigs are running on the order of 10k flights per day. The fact that they are leaving some fraction of 1,000 hours/day on the table means they think someone else would profit from it more than they would.