Enlarge /. During the pandemic, several airlines changed the boarding process to create more distance between passengers.
Jason Steffen studies planets in other solar systems. His most famous work – OK, the second most famous work – was NASA's Kepler Mission, an overview of planetary systems. However, it's more likely that you've heard of Steffen, a professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, in an entirely different context: as a student of the airplane boarding process. Years ago, after waiting in another line on a packed jetway, the physicist thought to himself, "There must be a better way than this."
Airlines invest in boarding time – and to a lesser extent offboarding – because time equals money. Flying people all over the world is a low profit margin business. The faster you can load a flight into the air and then deflate it on the ground, the faster you can get the next round of paying customers up in the air.
In 2008 Steffen published an article about his path, which has become known as the Steffen Method. Forget the point counters in business class. Forget the smug credit card companies with airline logo and priority boarding. Forget about first class passengers too – the free champagne can wait. The fastest way to get on a plane is to allow many people to do many boarding tasks at the same time. Start with the person in the window seat in the last row on the right. The person in the penultimate window seat goes next, allowing time to swing objects into the luggage compartment. Then the person in the penultimate window seat and so on until the right side is full. Then the left side. Then the same pattern for middle seats. Then the corridor. Yeah, a little complicated.
advertising
It's been over a decade, and you may not be surprised to learn that no airline has fully embraced the Steffen Method. Indeed, there is a subgenre of global researchers – engineers, physicists, computer scientists, cyberneticists, and economists – looking for more optimal ways of pushing crowds onto flying metal pipes. They have developed at least 20 methods of getting people on planes. But for many reasons – airline finances, airport infrastructure, technological deficiencies – their research has largely fallen on deaf ears. In 2013 the Dutch airline KLM experimented with a modified boarding procedure based on the Steffen method. However, the company later said the study had no "tangible added value".
Now a global pandemic has done the seemingly impossible: rocking planes. In addition to requesting masks, providing hand sanitizer, and in some cases banning passengers from medium-sized seats, many airlines have developed boarding and disembarking processes to avoid flyers from being packed too tightly together.
Delta, which previously boarded passengers by ticket class and membership in the Miles Club, loads the plane from back to front so that flyers don't pass by others on the way to their seats. After pre-boarding families and passengers who need extra time, United also goes from front to front. Even Southwest, known for allowing passengers to choose their seats, only allows 10 passengers at a time instead of the usual 30. The process is certainly slower, but Southwest and other airlines have far fewer passengers these days.
Researchers pushing for smarter approaches to boarding airplanes hope for further changes. Major changes in aviation usually only occur when people die or are injured, says Michael Schultz, who studies aviation at the Technical University of Dresden. The airlines "try to learn what's wrong and then try to improve," he says.
advertising
Against this background, Schultz has been working with colleagues around the world since last spring to find the fastest and safest way and to simulate how people can currently get on and off planes. He hopes the pandemic will push airlines to update their technology so they can dynamically board passengers and send an alert to a passenger's smartphone when it is their turn. He believes that an aircraft cabin filled with sensors could help the crews guide passengers through often hectic deboarding.
"The airlines are dealing with a very valuable balancing act," says Martin Rottler, an aviation veteran who now leads his own consultancy. "You have to balance efficiency with customer satisfaction and now increase security."
Using simulations, the researchers developed a boarding method that reconciles the efficiency of the airline with the safety of passengers during a pandemic.
Using simulations, the researchers developed a boarding method that reconciles the efficiency of the airline with the safety of passengers during a pandemic.
Another team of researchers split between Bucharest in Romania and Potsdam in New York believe they have hacked the perfect mix. They call it the "WilMA Back-to-Front-Offset-2" and it's branded in from back to front in rows with the window seats first. With this method, it can happen that a passenger on the way back briefly passes someone who is already sitting at the window. But it threads the needle, say the researchers, between safety and efficiency.
In fact, the boarding process is a bit similar to what many airlines are currently doing. "They just don't quite optimize the method," to make it even simpler, says John Milne, professor of engineering management at Clarkson University who worked on the research. In other words, it is high time that the obsessives of the academic airplane, not the businessmen, are responsible for a change.
This story originally appeared on wired.com.