Astrophysicist’s Plan Cuts Airplane Boarding Time in Half

Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist, has developed a new method for boarding an airplane that cuts the time in half.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on September 01 2011

After you’ve already dealt with the security pat-down and constantly changing flight times, standing in the aisle waiting to board the plane for 20 minutes just adds insult to injury. So Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist from Chicago, decided to come up with a solution to the all-too-common problem.

Being an astrophysicist, he started by coming up with calculations and developing computer models to determine which boarding methods would be the most efficient. He discovered that allowing passengers to board at random was faster than the current section-by-section model—the airlines’ organization attempts actually slow things down. The fastest method, however, was one of Steffen’s own design: boarding alternating rows simultaneously, starting with the window seats. This method gives passengers enough room to stow their luggage at the same time.

Although Steffen published his results three years ago, he recently decided to enact the experiment with real people, enlisting 72 “passengers” to board a replica airline, using several different boarding methods. Just as predicted, Steffen’s method was the fastest.

Steffen hasn’t received any attention from airlines yet, but he thinks that may be on its way.

“Before they could have said, look, this guy’s a crackpot. So what if he wrote some software? We want real data with real passengers,” Steffen told WBEZ. “Now that we have that, I guess we’ll see.”

Check out Steffen’s method in action.

Filed under: Science, Weird,

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