Airplane boarding is the worst logistics project ever approved by human beings

Let's look at the data.

A single-aisle airplane has, say, thirty rows and six seats per row. One aisle. One door. One hundred and eighty people, each carrying a bag designed to fit "most airlines" — which, in engineering terms, means "none".

The current process consists of taking those hundred and eighty people and pushing them through the same tube, in the same direction, at the same time. In any factory this would have a name: bottleneck. At the airport, it's called "priority boarding".

First: the current design

The most common system splits passengers into groups. The groups are called over a loudspeaker whose intelligibility, by my informal measurement, sits below 40%. The groups are formed not by seating logic but by credit card tier.

Nico, who was with me on our last trip, put it better than I could: "They call us by income, not by row."

Second: the structural flaw

The problem isn't the number of people. It's the single point of failure: the passenger standing in the aisle stowing a bag. While he wrestles with the overhead bin, everyone behind him stops. If he's in row 4 and the person behind him is in row 28, row 28 waits for a problem that isn't theirs.

Make it worse with the migratory bag phenomenon: since the bin above your seat is already full, you stow your bag in row 6 and sit in row 22. On the way out, you swim upstream. It's a system that fails on entry and on exit. Rare. Almost admirable.

Third: the redesign

The redesign isn't my invention. Academic studies and simulations — the most cited being astrophysicist Jason Steffen's, in 2008 — suggest that staggered boarding, where several passengers stow bags at the same time in different stretches of the aisle, is faster than boarding in back-to-front blocks.

The simplified version, which even Nico can follow:

1. Window seats first, then middle seats, then aisle seats.
2. Within each stage, alternate rows, so nobody is stuck right behind somebody else in the aisle.
3. Carry-on above your own seat. No exceptions. No "just for a second over here".

Fourth: why it will never happen

Because boarding order is a product. People pay to get on first, to sit down earlier inside a tube where they'll be sitting for three hours. It's the only line in the world where you pay to wait longer.

I logged it in the notebook: grade-five nonconformity. Nico asked me to note that they don't give out peanuts anymore. Noted. Grade two.