MAYBE YOU DON’T think you and your favorite airline agree on anything: on how much room an adult human requires, on what counts as food, or on how much it should cost for a soothing, tiny bottle of wine. But surely you agree on at least one point: People take way too long getting to their seats.
For passengers, the cumbersome boarding process—watching people insist that yes, this bag will fit in the overhead bin, it has before!—means more time spent jammed in a too-small seat. For airlines, it means lost revenue. In an industry with tight profit margins, every moment a plane spends on the tarmac is time it’s not making money.
What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that man set foot on the Moon but that they set eye on the earth.
This is the concept known as turnaround time: how long it takes an airline to get the people and luggage off a plane that has just landed, to clean, refuel, and restock it, then get a new load of people and bags in. It’s a complex dance, says Martin Rottler, a lecturer at The Ohio State University's Center for Aviation Studies. But in this ballet, humanity proves difficult to choreograph. “The loading of passengers is one of those clunky dancers in the background.”
For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.
The Final Frontier
There can be no thought of finishing for ‘aiming for the stars.’ Both figuratively and literally, it is a task to occupy the generations. And no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.
And so every airline spends a lot of time cooking up and testing new ways to funnel the masses of people and roller bags into airplanes.
The latest bid comes from United, which is in the midst of a month-long test at Los Angeles International Airport. Usually, United puts its five groups of passengers in five parallel lines, and people can queue up as early as they like. Now, it will use just two lines for all five groups. Group one will go in one, group two in the other. Once they’re all safely lodged in the plane, the gate agents will have the next three groups line up, one at a time, in the second lane. Any latecomers in the already called groups can use the first lane. As before, those groups will divide passengers not by row, but by seat type: window people go first, then middle and aisle folks. And as always, everybody with any sort of priority status will go first. The goal is to keep everyone moving, letting people near the end of the line stay seated for longer, and minimize crowding around the gate that makes everything more of a pain. To summarize: It's still five groups, but instead of five lines, you get two.