Let’s talk about airplane boarding — and why it’s so hard

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When Southwest Airlines (LUV) launched more than 50 years ago, one of its most distinguishing characteristics was the way it got customers onto airplanes. Seats weren’t assigned, and passengers had to fend for themselves when it was time to grab a spot. It was a quirk as much a part of the airline’s identity as its low, no-frill fares.

But as activist investor Elliott Investment Management fought its way onto Southwest’s board this year amid a run of flagging business, one change management made was to get rid of the “open seating” policy. Ryan Green, the carrier’s chief commercial officer, said at an investor day in September that customers were tired of fighting for spots:

Preferences were unequivocal: Eighty percent of Southwest customers want assigned seating, as do 86% of other airlines’ customers. And looking at lapsed customers, the seating and boarding process is the number one reason they haven’t returned to Southwest. We were struck by how clear the message was. There is an absolute need for us to evolve our model to better meet customer preferences.

Bringing order to the boarding experience has long been a challenge for airlines, but the precise logistics of the practice can present their own obstacles. American Airlines (AAL) has started testing a literal alarm that goes off to keep zone-jumpers from getting on too early.

(Maximum number of boarding zones) By the digits

6 – United Airlines (UAL)

8 – Delta Air Lines (DAL)

9 – American Airlines

10 – JetBlue Airways (JBLU)

4 – Frontier Airlines

3 – Southwest Airlines

Explain it to me like I’m five!

Are there no better ideas?

There have been a number of techniques used to get passengers onboard airplanes over the years. First-class and business travelers typically got to board first because of their status (and premium fares), but seating everyone else was a pain.

Back-to-front was long thought the most efficient, but people kept getting in each others’ way as they waited to get to their forward-situated seats. Southwest’s open-seating style, where everyone was on their own, was catchy with customers and copied by some competitors in the 1970s because it turned out to be the fastest — even if it introduced a bit more competition to the itinerary than flyers anticipated.

In the 1990s, United Airlines experimented with “zone” seating on its shuttle service, which wasn’t done by section horizontally but vertically, like passengers were getting loaded into a semi-truck trailer. As an academic paper laid out at the time:

Zone 1 seats are window seats on the right side of the plane; Zone 2, window seats on the left side of the plane; Zone 3, middle seats on the right; Zone 4, middle seats on the left; Zone 5, aisle seats on the right; and Zone 6, aisle seats on the left.

Engineers at United discovered that the system was actually faster than Southwest’s method. But in the early 2000s, American Airlines came onto the scene with the “group” method that has become the industry standard. Instead of row-by-row or column-by-column seating, passengers would embark in bursts according to the area of the plane they were heading to.

It likely helped that the advent of for-pay “priority boarding” as an add-on grew into a niche revenue stream pioneered by the likes of JetBlue Airways.

Quotable

“Merely boarding the plane involves lots of parsing of status and priority — distinguishing the seraphim from the cherubim, an elaborate ritual that can extend the time to load to load a 150-seat domestic jet to nearly 40 minutes…nearly double the time it took less-hierarchical Southwest to fill up in its glory days.” — Mark Gerchick, former chief counsel to the Federal Aviation Administration, in his 2013 book Full Upright and Locked Position.

Brief history

1999: Year we’re gonna party like it is (please link the dates – including the colon)

1914: The first commercial flight takes off in St. Petersburg, Florida. Two people were onboard: Tony Jannus, the pilot and Abe Pheil, the passenger. Jannus boarded first, then Pheil.

1971: First Southwest Airlines flight, which featured free-for-all “open” seating.

2013: Alaska Airlines (ALK) tests dual-door boarding, in which passengers get on in the front and back of the plane.

2024: Southwest Airlines announces it will end open seating.

Fun fact!

In 2008, astrophysicist Jason Steffen devised what he said was the optimal plane boarding method: Column-by-column, skipping rows, going from window seats to aisle seats then middle seats. The technique, which doesn’t take into effect factors like traveling with small children or first class privileges, has not proven popular.