February theme: Aviation securityBetter way to board a plane
Fermi Lab physicist studies different ways for passengers to board a plane; using a Monte Carlo optimization algorithm, he found the optimal method: Passengers would board 10 at a time in every other row (since loading luggage requires about two aisles of space); this way, passengers could always be boarding luggage or sitting in their seats, rather than waiting in the aisle, as in current boarding methods
It makes to look anew at things we have done the same way for years. For example: Boarding a plane. Most airlines board passengers the same way, first filling the seats in the back of the plane, and then moving to the front. After a recent experience boarding a plane in this manner, Fermilab physicist Jason Steffen wondered if there might be a better way. So, in the midst of studying gravitation and axion-like particles, Steffen took a short break to investigate an optimal boarding method for airline passengers “I remember waiting in line to scan my ticket inside the terminal, I believe it was at the Seattle airport,” Steffen told PhysOrg.com. “I remember being quite disappointed when I saw how long the second line was — the one at the entrance to the airplane — and how slowly it moved…. That’s when I thought that there had to be a better way to get people onto the airplane than the one that was being employed. I didn’t have the time to work on it right then, so I brooded over it for almost 18 months. Last year, I decided that I either needed to solve the problem or stop thinking about it.”
In his analysis, Steffen found that the worst method for boarding a plane is boarding from the front to the back, since passengers have to wait and step over each other to get to their seats. As he explains in a paper submitted to the Journal of Air Transport Management, conventional wisdom suggests that boarding in a manner opposite to the slowest method seems like it should be the fastest method. Quite unexpectedly, then, Steffen found that the common back-to-front boarding method is actually the second worst method possible, only slightly better than boarding front to back. “I was certain that the worst way to load the airplane was from front to back, so I ran my simulation in that configuration first to set a baseline,” Steffen said. “I was also somewhat convinced that the optimal way would be from back to front or something like it. I half expected to find that back-to-front loading is several times faster than front-to-back. Had that been true, I was prepared to run the two simulations, see how much faster it was, be satisfied, and put it aside. When the results were almost identical, I first thought
