More than 800 airport hospitality workers walked off the job this morning, demanding better wages. It’s all happening on one of the busiest and most stressful travel days of the year. Millions of people will pass through LAX this Thanksgiving weekend.
One of the worst parts of flying: boarding the plane. That often involves jockeying through a cramped aisle as your fellow passengers invade your personal space and breathe on you. Someone might create a bottleneck by struggling to put their oversized carry-on into the overhead bin. And you and your seatmate have to unbuckle and get up when that window-seated passenger finally shows.
United Airlines says there is a better way. A few weeks ago, they implemented a new boarding process they’re calling “WILMA,” an acronym for window, middle, aisle (the L doesn’t stand for anything). First class will still take their seats first, but those in coach/economy will follow the new order.
United says they’ve conducted many experiments with real customers on real flights, and this boarding strategy is the fastest, notes Ben Cohen, who writes The Wall Street Journal’s Science of Success column. He points out that airlines have been concerned about speedy boarding for a long time “because even just saving two minutes in how long it takes to board a plane can save these airlines hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
Cohen profiled one person who’s been thinking about this for more than a decade: Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He used computer models and coded an algorithm to optimize airplane boarding.
“The first person on the plane, under his method, is the passenger in the window seat on the last row of one side of the plane. So let's say that’s seat 30A. The next person aboard would be 28A, and then 26A, and then 24A until the window seats on the even rows on the right side of the plane are entirely full. Then we get the window seats in even rows on the left side. Then the window seats in odd rows on the right side and left side. We go from window to middle to aisle.”
Cohen continues, “The reason why he says this not only works but is the optimal way to board an airplane is because it clears up the primary bottleneck of boarding, which is people waiting in the aisle because of those leopard-print … suitcases and how long it takes people to load those suitcases, and that terrible tango that we all do when someone has to get up from the aisle seat for the window seat to sneak on by. And so this method is meant to solve that particular problem.”
Steffen and a TV producer tested the method by renting a mock Boeing 757 fuselage on a soundstage in Los Angeles, then hired volunteers and Hollywood extras to board. They timed the method and found that it was the fastest, with WILMA coming in second place.
However, Cohen says airlines will likely never adopt the Steffen method because it’s not practical. “It violates the way that these airlines run their businesses. The people who fly the most and pay the most want to board the earliest, right? And good luck telling the person who flies every week from New York to California that someone in 48F is going to board before they do.”
What about the idea of airlines allowing passengers to check in all their luggage for free and not bring them onboard? Cohen says he hasn’t talked to airlines directly about this, but they’ve likely thought about it and decided against it — instead putting more value on frequent flier and status programs.