It's something every airline passenger must think as they jostle past and clamber over their fellow flyers to find their seat: There has got to be a better way.
Now a test carried out on a mock plane used in Hollywood movies seems to have found it. Instead of boarding passengers in blocks of rows at a time, from the back to the front of the plane, as many airlines do, the new method – which takes about half the time – has only one person from a given row take their seat at a time.
Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, came up with the method in 2008 after running computer simulations to find the most efficient boarding technique.
The simulations showed that the best way was to board every other row of window seats on one side of the plane, starting from the back, then do the mirror image on the other side. The remaining window seats on the first side would follow, again starting from the back; then their counterparts on the second side; followed by the same procedure with middle seats and lastly aisles (see illustration).
The method is similar, but more detailed, than a suggestion put forward in 2006 by Eitan Bachmat and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
