Improving airplane boarding time: a review, a field study and an experiment with a new way of hand luggage stowing

The airplane (de)boarding process is not organized optimally. The goal of this paper is to search for improvement possibilities. In this paper literature is reviewed, boarding characteristics are studied in a field study and a pilot study with a new way of hand luggage stowing is performed. Computer simulations indicate that there are more efficient boarding methods than those currently in use, like the reverse pyramid method which starts window seat columns in the back and ends with aisle seat columns in the front. The literature also shows that hand luggage stowing in the overhead lockers can block other passengers increasing the boarding time. Also, the field observations and the pilot test indicate that hand luggage stowing could block the aisle and is one of the main elements in boarding that influences passenger experience and boarding time. Training and preparing the boarding process could potentially reduce the boarding time by 3-4 minutes, but further research is needed to prove this

A Comparison of Algorithms That Estimate the Effectiveness of Commercial Airline Boarding Strategies

The number of passengers carried by commercial aircraft has increased dramatically over the past 50 years, closely in-step with advances in aircraft design. This makes unloading and loading an aircraft, called turn-around time, critical to the success of the airport, the aircraft and the airlines. A number of mathematical algorithms have been developed over the years that purport to determine the most efficient boarding strategy for passengers by decreasing turn time. This thesis evaluated the boarding strategies most often used by the airlines and algorithms used to predict boarding efficiency. The models used were obtained from the literature and from personal communication with the authors. The strategy and the model associated with the greatest predicted reduction in turn-around time, and the amount of time to deplane and enplane commercial airliners was determined. The Kruskal-Wallis one way analysis of variance test was used to determine that the Random boarding strategy had the greatest boarding rate and the rotating zone strategy had the slowest. It was also determined that one of the models, the Ferarri and Nagel sensitivity analysis algorithm, was consistently predictive of the empirical observations of boarding strategies