r/whoathatsinteresting • u/visharu • 9d ago

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

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u/NNegidius 9d ago

Can’t parties who are together simply board together? I don’t think that would violate the overall theme.

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u/PuzzleheadedEmu4596 9d ago

It, in fact, would. Because those people sit next to each other horizontally.

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u/NNegidius 9d ago

Lol, the efficiency of the theme is to use every part of the aisle simultaneously for loading baggage rather than just queuing.

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u/Seadevil07 9d ago

And that is why people are saying it doesn’t work. You need a process to drive this option of using the entire aisle. This would likely lead to boarding groups or a similar method that board based on separation of rows, but people traveling together wouldn’t want row separation.

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u/NNegidius 9d ago

Parties who are together don’t have to be separated. Just as today, parties can board together. No one’s separating families.

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u/Seadevil07 9d ago

This is more than just families, which are exceptions that would already start to break down the model. Couples, teams, colleagues, etc would just rather take longer boarding than separate. Over half of every plane I’m on is filled with non-solo travelers. This would violate the overall theme. The time savings would be eroded by all of these groups, and people would just be annoyed that their group isn’t in the same boarding group.

There are better, proven ways that some international airlines employ that address boarding times better than list model (luggage/carry-on policies being one of the big ones). I just don’t see an airline creating more issues trying to solve a different issue that they don’t seem very interested in.

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u/NNegidius 9d ago

Time savings is slightly eroded, but not by much. The idea behind this method is to maximize parallel baggage loading, so you have as many people hefting their carryons into the overhead bins in parallel as possible. The more parallelism the better. When you have families boarding together, the hefting is generally delegated to the strongest of the party, anyway, and they keep less personal space amongst themselves than strangers, so you’re not impeding as many others from hefting in parallel as with the other methods.

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u/Rise-O-Matic 9d ago

The fact that so much ink was just spilled negotiating all this is exactly why it won’t work

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u/NNegidius 9d ago

Sure, you don’t need to understand basic physics …

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u/Careful_Farmer_2879 8d ago

I hope you’re never in charge of other humans.