I'm somewhat agoraphobic, and I always hated boarding airplanes, but I eventually found a way to avoid most of the bullshit: pick an aisle seat, and board the plane last or close to last on purpose.
It's a bit interesting to just sit there at the gate and watch people rush to get into the line as fast as possible. The plane leaves at the same time for everyone anyway. Crowd behaviour is a very strange and paradoxical thing sometimes.
It isn't that paradoxical. Waiting until the last minute can make a you victim of the "overhead bin space" pirates who load up the bins with stuff that should have been checked and leave you to worry about gate checking.
The fear is real. There is no space under the seat for both a bag and feet if you are tall. I carry a reasonable sized carry on but it contains a work laptop and a few mobile devices / tablets (I'm a mobile dev) plus prescription medication. I get so anxious waiting to see if there will be space.
Also, a seated passenger has a better legal status than an unseated one. In the event of a seat dispute, sit down (in any seat, if you have to) and let the cabin crew sort out the mess.
Being "seated" is not, but being "boarded" actually is, with respect to being bumped. Generally, being boarded means that you can only really be removed from the plane for inappropriate behavior, otherwise your removal is considered by definition involuntary, which means more compensation (and cash compensation, at that - which I know is changing soon).
And even if it were, I can't imagine actually bringing lawyers into it even in the rare event of the airline not noticing until after boarding that two people have the same seat.
Yeah the real reason to get on the plane first is bag space. With that said I do like Southwest’s method where the earlier you get on the plane the better your seat is. It incentivizes getting to the gate early and as such on time departures and still lets them play with fare classes and tiers
I don't think it's that strange. People can queue early because they want to get overhead storage space (it often fills up), or just get the process done with and sit down and relax.
Personally I can focus on my book better if I'm boarded and don't have to monitor announcements.
> The plane leaves at the same time for everyone anyway.
And I'd rather wait for it on the plane than at the gate. Once I'm on the plane that's it for X hours, can relax more, nothing I need to do for a while.
You realise they sell (or it's a perk of travel class / reward system / etc.) priority boarding right? Some people do value boarding early, they're not confused and think the plane is going to move sooner.
Too late to edit, but for the same reason if I possibly can (i.e. no checked luggage or bag drop open) I'll wait post- not pre-security. The common thing being just to move forward as far as possible as soon as possible, and spend as long as possible with nothing imminent to do.
I have travelled a fair bit. For me, getting my boarding pass scanned, boarding the aircraft, bag stowed, my little bit of electronics sorted, sitting in my seat - it means I’m done, I have no more responsibilities, I can relax until I get to my destination.
Until I’m on the plane, I have to live in the world of the airport, where things can and do go wrong. Once I’m on the plane, I can go back to my own world.
If you are traveling with hand luggage and it's a busy flight I try to board early so I can store it above myself, it very often happens that the overhead compartment is full and they ask you to store your luggage 5 rows behind you which is annoying (Especially on tight connections).
My traveling stress went down significantly once I got a travel backpack, because I don't need to use the overhead bin anymore, I just cram it under the seat in front of me. And in general carrying a backpack is easier than rolling luggage. Granted this only works for business travel, when I can pack lightly.
It's funny, I recently switched from a backpack to a hard carry on case specifically because using a backpack was causing me to have to store my bag under the seat in front of me, thereby losing space for my feet and having to deal with my legs being squashed and my foot at an uncomfortable angle for the entire flight.
Little hack the flight attendants don’t like when making their takeoff and landing checks: just put the bag under your legs and stretch them out. If the plain hit major turbulence your legs are still pinning the bag from being on top of them but you can actually fully extend your knees.
Ironically, most of this habit came from the airlines having horrible baggage times. They invested in this a lot to the point that for most of the airports I'm usually in (SEA, SLC, DAL, BOS), even when I do check bags, I can't remember a time in the last few years where my bags haven't been on the carousel by the time I get there.
The only things I will not ever check are my camera gear, and I'll fight to avoid a gate check too (I've only had one occasion where I've been pressed to do so, and I just told the agent that what was in the case exceeded their checked bag insurance, and she told me to take it with me. I've also heard anecdotes about photographers carrying $50 or $100 and if being 'required' to gate check, turning to people behind them and saying "this is for you if you'll gate check so I don't have to" - no idea how that's worked out for them).
After choosing an aisle seat on Aer Lingus where the flight attendants were rushing alcohol past me to various customers, I think the window seat ultimately lets me touch fewer people. So many people bumping past your shoulders and legs in the aisle!
I usually book a window seat, so I am quite keen to get on early simply so that I'm not jumping over anyone who may have sat down in a seat away from the window.
I'm rushing on for the same reasons you hang around and that's to help the boarding process.
They can sell better seat selection access and bin selection for luggage for those allowed to load up first.
Southwest does a pretty good job of this extraction of money for plausibly better access with early bird, A-list, and related things.
The flight attendants then are relied upon to get people on and off the plane quickly.
The fire department recently acknowledged they will not be responding to calls to 4-5 man lift huge individuals unable to get into or out of their seat(s!) as too many have been injured. This has led to multiple delays as it is not in many people’s job description to perform. On the job injury coverage will not cover it.
> The fire department recently acknowledged they will not be responding to calls to 4-5 man lift huge individuals unable to get into or out of their seat(s!) as too many have been injured. This has led to multiple delays as it is not in many people’s job description to perform. On the job injury coverage will not cover it.
On planes? I've never seen or heard of this.
In general? As a firefighter, one, it absolutely is in our "job description" as such. It's literally categorized as a lift assist call by our County Dispatch/911, and while it is prioritized as a 'yellow' call (low/er), it is also not an "optional" response (which some smoke investigations or burn ban violations are), and lift injuries absolutely are covered by our workplace insurance, and are some of the most common.
It wouldn’t work. Strict back-to-front boarding means that only two people can get into their seats at a time in the entire plane — parallelism is lost. If a single person is slow, the entire plane waits.
You need a more scattered order for good performance.
People arrive late, people come from delayed connections, people have to use the bathroom. Not sure how that could work unless you have the exact same number of seats as the plane on every gate.
Unless it's dedicated to a certain aircraft type, that mostly makes sense, otherwise the jetbridge section between doors would have to accordion to account for the length of the plane.
I don't recall like that, but there are also double decker jet bridges to board both levels of the A380 at once.
Disembarking from both ends makes it so much quicker. When it's pouring with rain, we only disembark from the front of the airplane and it takes _forever_.
EZ Air in the Caribbean, there are no sest numbers on the ticket, just sit wherever. Fastest I've ever seen a plane, albeit small, load. The staff were very friendly too. It was so novel, I was excited for my return flight to experience it again.
Southwest in the U.S. does this too, and you board in the order you checked in. This gives a real advantage to people on the 2nd or later leg of their trip, because they can check in for all their flights 24 hours before the first one is scheduled to leave, whereas anybody whose first or only flight is this specific flight has to wait until 24 hours before this plane is scheduled to take off.
This method actually might be feasible without leaving every passenger bewildered if they combined it with Southwest's system of queuing people in numbered order before they board. Each passenger is assigned a specific boarding order instead of a boarding group, so no "group 123" problems. I think Southwest as proven that people can figure out how to stand in order "A group, 1-30 on this side, 31-60 on this side," and then B and C groups.
It'd just be a matter of assigning A1 to the person in the back row window seat on the left, A2 to the person two rows in front of that on the left, etc., as demonstrated in the video.
Families with young kids could queue up together, because they're (probably) going to be sitting together in one row anyway, and they would have a row's buffer on either side of them while the parents are trying to help the kids get situated.
Why was it ever a problem? Perhaps this is US issue, (in Russian and EU airports) everybody lines up first come, first board. Then the process is really fast. Everybody just takes their seat and that's it.
The landing wait is annoying but boarding is practically a non-issue.
The video does say that the random FIFO is more efficient than the boarding group thing, but you have to pay extra to get priority boarding, so airlines are incentivized to make the boarding annoying enough to make you pay for it.
Presumably they depends on the exact specifics of the economics involved - the airlines are only incentivised the way you say if there's more money to be made from the amount of revenue brought in by people paying to jump the queue than savings to be had from the fact that for every minute less their typical boarding takes is a minute less of time they need to have a departure lounge allocated for each plane, & a minute less of time for a number of staff working it.
> so airlines are incentivized to make the boarding annoying enough to make you pay for it.
until you "board first" with a budget airline at an airport that makes you stand just outside the gate in a common (loses queue) and un-airconditioned space until they're ready to actually board. Then paying for boarding first is an absolute privilege, especially when the riffraff can run to the plane first anyway.
Carryon bags - a fair amount of the time the airlines run out of overhead baggage space for the last people on the plane, and force you to check your bag.
I mean it all sounds fun but when you consider for example low-cost airlines in Europe (WizzAir, Ryanair) they’re really efficient without any of this, since their margins depend on it. Surprisingly their boarding isn’t as structured (only priority and then the rest) and they still only take around 30 mins total from first to last passengers being let through a gate in my experience. Their trick is probably some combination of motivated passengers, asking people to put stuff under the seat in from, remote stands that need a bus and flight attendants constantly announcing „please don’t block the aisle”.
Having not one more carry-on/roll-aboard than will fit in the overhead compartments is easily the most important thing to get right. Making the passengers pay for that space is the key.
This also explains why many airlines do the boarding group thing: because it rewards the frequent flyers with access to overhead bin space!
That's the reason that people want to board first!
So why not just charge for overhead bin space? Because it's unseemly and -anyways- hard to get right.
I flew Aer Lingus recently and the flight had exactly that: 1 free item of checked luggage, pay for hand luggage (except an under-the-seat-in-front-of-you personal item).
It worked great except that the bag-check process was absolutely terrible: every passenger had to go to the desk outside security. But other airlines have solved that issue (separate check-in and self-service-tag-printing+bag-drop-only queues make a big difference).
The thing I find funny about WizzAir/Ryanair is that because they have bundled the larger cabin bags with their priority boarding, when you show up, about 90% of the people are in the so called priority boarding queue.
> Surprisingly their boarding isn’t as structured (only priority and then the rest) and they still only take around 30 mins total from first to last passengers being let through a gate in my experience.
What's surprising about that? That's how you do quick boarding. Southwest has always done it that way. They start boarding 30 minutes before departure. And stop 10 minutes before.
What the long boarding line accomplishes is that it forces people to wait in a long line, which you can charge them to skip. Think of it as a mobile game with microtransactions, but for airplanes.
I have watched this before but can’t right now, and I think it might discuss this at the end if I recall, but always these systems seem to work amazingly in theory but in the real world break down because of families wanting to board together, people all not being ready and waiting at the gate, and the huge amount of effort (requiring more staff) and space it would actually take in the terminal to corral people in preparation of boarding…
It’s a fun thought experiment but it’s just one of those things where it seems there’s no ‘good’ solution that actually works in reality, but the less you try to organise it, the closer to a ‘least-worst’ situation you get…
The video actually calls out that families needing to sit together make the idealized (Steffen) method impossible in the real world, but then presents a modified version which takes that and other wrinkles into account.
Well when I board a plane, first I get to my seat WITH MY HANDBAGS IN HAND, then after all the fuss settles down I put my bags in the bags compartment. Seems the sensitive and polite thing to do, not hold everyone in line till I'd done stuffing my bags in the compartment. Yet also what I do is an extreme oulier as everyone just focuses on their needs and fuck others. Also bonus for being considerate, when the commotion finally settles and I reach to store my bags, there's no room anymore because everyone brought not one but 5 bags each and stuffed them in the least optimum way, one layout occupying on average the space for three.
After several such experiences you fall back to the least common denominator: block everyone until you stuff your 7 handbags occupying 3 compartments and fuck the next people in line.
It's a bit interesting to just sit there at the gate and watch people rush to get into the line as fast as possible. The plane leaves at the same time for everyone anyway. Crowd behaviour is a very strange and paradoxical thing sometimes.