13 ms·

The Fill and Flush deplaning method

82 points by very_good_man 3y ago

very_good_man 3y ago
I have "invented" a system that I believe reduces aircraft deplaning time by ~50% source code at: www.github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush
sodellicious1 3y ago
This looks incredibly cool, you are surely a very good man
muffinator3000 3y ago
Clever
glitcher 3y ago
The problem is that families sit in rows together, not usually in columns. And in busy airports it's not very ideal to get split up from your travel partners, especially if they are young, old, need assistance, etc.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  I believe the response to this objection is to just have the groups wait for later "flush"es / make "trades" with strangers who would otherwise exit in later waves.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    That's a lot of extra coordination to add to a method that already depends on an awful lot of coordination.
- ubj 3y ago
  Second this point, especially when flying with young children. But I imagine that slight modifications could be made to get a hybrid approach.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Have y'all flown recently, or ever??? I feel it's hard enough these days to get people on planes to be fully clothed, semi-sober, and to refrain from violence. And somehow we're all going to coordinate perfectly to get this complicated choreography to work?
- btilly 3y ago
  This is what I came to say. The proposal is obviously written by someone who is single and travels alone.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    > Unresolved Issues: > How to accommodate the elderly, people with children, and groups. Guys, you have to read the article at least. It's stated in the "further discussion" section so at least add something more than just repeating the topic. Or, I suppose, rewritten in the vernacular of this site: "This comment is obviously written by someone who didn't read the proposal properly".
    - btilly 3y ago
      Your judgement is wrong. I had read that. I retain my opinion of the article. They ignore the elderly, families, and groups. Which are a large portion of travelers. Plus they acknowledge that they are creating passenger conflicts, and don't address that. Coming up with a better proposal than this is trivial. Here goes. During flight, lock the overhead bins. When deplaneing, those without overhead luggage go first, from first to last row as now. This makes sense because they generally walk faster because they have less stuff. Those with overhead luggage have to wait for the steward or stewardess to unlock the overhead bins following the fast group, and then exit from last row to first. Therefore those who are slow to get things out of bins, do not slow others. Those needing assistance wait until the very end, as now. Getting stuff out of bins is the gating factor here. And so there is no passenger conflict about the fast people leaving first, because the others are waiting on the bins being unlocked, then for people behind them to pass. And groups get to leave together. There you go. A faster approach than now. With fewer problems.
      - very_good_man 3y ago
        While I reject your condescending tone, locking the overheads is possibly a good idea but requires major equipment upgrades. I do not believe locking mechanisms in the overhead compartments are currently installed. Controls to instantly lock/unlock such systems remotely by one attendant, thousands of times, reliably, is yet another challenge. Better to engineer a solution that requires no new equipment.
gobills2024 3y ago
Brilliant! I Would love to see this improvement.
nsedlet 3y ago
This is great. This is mentioned in the discussion topics section ("modeling randomness in gathering belongings"). But I wonder what the distribution of baggage-gathering time looks like? I'd guess pretty positively skewed, i.e. most people are pretty quick but then a few people take a long time or a really long time. The speed of the flush stage of a particular wave is capped at the slowest person in that wave.
nradov 3y ago
What's the point? I'm going to have to wait for my checked bags anyway. Passengers who really care about deplaning quickly should just select seats near the front.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  I have calculated this would save between 50 and 150 human life-equivalents of time per year. You can see this calculation if you scroll to the bottom of the simulation page.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    Sure, but it doesn’t add up to much useful time per person… Aggregate time saving across large numbers of people just seems like a fairly useless measure in general. To take it to an extreme, if you saved ten seconds in something everybody in the world does once or twice, you’d have saved a very large number of person years in aggregate but made basically no meaningful improvement to any individual’s life…
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  I’d think airlines would really want to put pax at the front that have tight connections (before or after). Unsure if any think this far ahead though. But I also think they should put healthy 25 year olds in the emergency exit row for… emergencies, but they’d rather sell those seats to someone that’s often the poorest candidate to execute in an emergency.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Since planes rarely fall directly out of the sky, I wonder if there’s documented cases of “oh it’s an actual emergency” and people swapping seats.
- parchley 3y ago
  You don't know that up front, e.g. if your plane is late and you need to hurry to a connecting flight.
tuckerwatts 3y ago
[dead]
lwhsiao 3y ago
CGP Grey did a great YouTube video on this several years ago, and why airlines won't use it: https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo Note that this is from a boarding, not deplaning viewpoint, but the concepts are similar.
sergiotapia 3y ago
In all of my flights I've seen that people allow the row in front of them to deplane first. It's just courtesy I've seen. Is this similar to "fill and flush"?
- very_good_man 3y ago
  That is modeled as "status quo" - this unfortunately leads to waste of the scarce aisle real estate, a resource that is better used in "Fill & Flush."
candiddevmike 3y ago
Airlines would bastardize this by doing it by class then column, as you can't have steerage riff raff get off before double platinum diamond medallion clearly superior than you first class. In that model, would it faster or slower for someone in the middle of end of the plane?
throw7 3y ago
"How First Class is handled." That's by far the easiest issue to handle: don't change a thing... they get off first exactly how they do now.
manuelabeledo 3y ago
This would defeat the economics of class seats, which is way more important for the airline than getting people out the aircraft, and it does not address the obvious issue with carry on luggage, which is an even bigger problem in single aisle aircrafts. And more obviously, the level of coordination required to make it work is just not worth it. Families flying together, babies, people with disabilities, etc., none are considered in the model.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  -First Class can keep getting off first, you still get the benefits if you apply this to Coach -Groups can wait for later "Flush" es - there is flexibility since I think you can fit a little more than one person in the aisle per row.
  - jghn 3y ago
    These days coach has multiple tiers and they're not necessarily in a uniform location. Whereas first class is always in the front
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    > First Class can keep getting off first, you still get the benefits if you apply this to Coach Domestic flights on single aisle aircrafts, have several classes (first, extra, etc.), with different price ranges. Even emergency exit seats come with some attached benefits, like priority boarding. Good luck telling customers that they paid extra for an emergency window seat, but have to wait until more than half of the plane have de-boarded to exit.
    - piva00 3y ago
      > Good luck telling customers that they paid extra for an emergency window seat, but have to wait until more than half of the plane have de-boarded to exit. That's exactly what already happens (at least in Europe), you don't get priority to de-board if you bought seats with extra leg room on the emergency exits, you have to wait.
LatteLazy 3y ago
This is slower than the current system because column 2 can not stand up (or prepare to exit) until others have completely exited. Also you cannot exit with the people you sit next too (like your toddler who will have to make their own way off?). And that's assuming anyone actually wants to minimise average time. Airlines don't. Neither do most passengers.
epups 3y ago
Unfortunately, no solution that relies on this level of coordination will ever work. We cannot even get people to not block the corridor randomly when boarding or offboarding, enforcing a routine like this is not going to happen. Sorry for being negative, I like that you came up with something clever. I've seen some similar attempts to make boarding more efficient. I just fly way too frequently and I think the world is not ready for this yet.
- bombcar 3y ago
  You could try to incentivize it - give free checked bags to those with window seats, but charge them for carry ons, and give carry ons for free to the aisle seats.
crazygringo 3y ago
This is clever thinking, but we've been running airlines for so long now, I can't help but wonder if this has already been tried, and if there were issues with it. Potentical obstacles I can imagine off the top of my head: - Will people even obey? What if half the people from the wrong side get up too? After a long tiring flight, will that anger people on the correct side and lead to fights? Having to show your ticket to prove you were in the right column to get off is not very customer-friendly - What about families with children, couples, and groups in general? People want to stay together. It doesn't matter if this is rational or not, it's what people want to feel safe and not anxious - Is it really even going to make much of a difference? In my experience, people are already mostly grabbing their bags quickly, simultaneously while the rows immediately ahead are starting to exit And of course, while this can in theory save perhaps a couple minutes for domestic passengers with only a carry-on, even in theory it saves no time at all for anyone who still has to go through a crowded passport control or wait for checked baggage.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Getting off the plane is already fairly quick. Everyone wants to get going, usually the plane is empty in 5 minutes or less. I think it would help with getting onto the plane. Filling the plane can easily take 20 minutes - which in a half hour turnaround is often the critical path. The challenge here is you need to get people to enter the plane door in a very precise order. Just 10% of people ignoring instructions probably eliminates most/all of the benefits. Groups who don't want to sit apart or board the plane apart have to go either first or last.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Getting people to board in a certain order isn't particularly difficult. Southwest does it already, even if they only use it to... make sitting in a grounded plane a perk of checking in early? I'm actually not sure why they do it.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
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frereubu 3y ago
Seems great in princinple, but I'm not sure this would work when coming up against human behaviour. It's as much as the stewards can do to stop some people charging down the aisle the minute the plane comes to a standstill, let alone communicating something this nuanced to everyone so they understand. It also means that families who are travelling together would need to deplane separately, which can screw up things in terms of helping each other with bags, and also wouldn't work with families who have multiple kids of an age where they need to walk with their parents. It feels like the kind of fragile system where you'd end up with so many exceptions that it becomes potentially even more messy as you'd need to communicate those exceptions and people would need to understand them.
- netsharc 3y ago
  That's probably why OP said it's open for discussion. But yeah herding (isn't the correct term flight attendants and not stewards?) the passengers would be difficult. Perhaps the procedure should be, if everyone in your group is holding all their belongings - either in the aisle or standing in the footspace of an aisle seat (so rows C and D in a 3-3 configuration), then they can join the deplaning wave. But if you're standing in the aisle but one from your group is still crouched in a window seat and will need to grab their bag, and you don't want to abandon them, then you don't occupy the aisle go back to your (presumably aisle-) seat and wait for the next wave/go into an empty row so the crouched passenger can stand in row C/D, and wait for the wave to finish so they can grab their bag.
mirekrusin 3y ago
"great" if you travel with kids/family.
deleted 3y ago
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mirekrusin 3y ago
Is getting off passengers a bottleneck in the whole thing?
- usefulcat 3y ago
  Yes, for anyone concerned about missing a subsequent connecting flight.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    If you’re worried about that tell the stewardess before your descent begins, they can prioritize you, up to and including moving you to first class just before landing.
  - mirekrusin 3y ago
    Flight connections are not synchronized at that time resolution. If they care about it then allocating seats closer to exit for people with connected flights would make more difference.
notahacker 3y ago
The simulation of the status quo makes the assumption that aisle seat passengers wait until the row ahead of them is clear before collecting their luggage, nobody ever manages to squeeze past someone collecting their luggage, nobody in a middle or window seat is ever able to retrieve or be given their luggage until the aisle opposite them is completely clear, nobody ever walks past someone in an aisle or middle seat that hasn't collected their luggage yet etc... Suffice to say, this is not my experience of boarding and leaving aircraft.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  The simulation assumes that ONE person in the status quo has a 0 second assemble belongings step, and just waits "minBuffer" time - so in the simulation on average this is 2 second delay rather than 5: https://github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush/blob/fc0fa73b5879cef375b5fbf7b171512928c9a7c0/src/models/Plane.js#L111 https://github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush/blob/fc0fa73b5879...
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
What if your bag is far from your seat?
- netsharc 3y ago
  That feels like an American thing, I fly in Europe and my luggage is almost always above my head or across the aisle. Do American fliers put it in the first space they see in the overhead luggage?
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - antonyt 3y ago
    In my American experience, flights these days are almost always completely full, and almost every passenger is bringing both an under-seat and overhead-bin carry-on item. The last 10% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage near their seats. The last 5% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage available at all. "Put it in the first space you see" is often explicitly an instruction that the cabin crew gives to boarders as overhead space starts dwindling. Passengers aren't doing it out of preference.
  - TillE 3y ago
    EasyJet (ie, in Europe) is constantly packed, and people who board later frequently need to find space elsewhere for their bag, because the space near them has already been taken.
mmastrac 3y ago
Airlines added baggage fees to capture more revenue. Passengers started bringing more carry-on luggage as a result, filling up the overhead bins. It now takes longer to gather ultra-heavy, overlarge carry-ons from the bins to exit the plane, affecting exit times. Stop nickel-and-diming for luggage and focus on efficiency gains like gate-checked small luggage. Add front and back exits to every gate ramp to improve boarding and unboarding.
owlbite 3y ago
I've often wondered whether they could "containerize" passengers by having the seating as a whole remove from the plane. People then have all the time in the world to get seated outbound, and additional space to deplane at their own speed inbound. You could even come up with a system for putting luggage directly under their seats obviating the need to collect it separately. (It would of course be a massive redesign of planes and airports, so probably not an easy starter).
- notahacker 3y ago
  So passengers crowd into narrow tubes a bit earlier, and then the narrow tubes are winched into the aircraft with the sort of painstaking precision that takes several minutes? Even assuming airframes could be redesigned to make this possible [at zero cost, without implications for structural integrity or operational complexity of the resulting aircraft] I'm not sure who benefits here?
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    Not sure if it needs to be a tube. Maybe the seats could be on a rail that slides into the airplane. Having to move the nose and tail of the plane up for this also brings us closer to my dream of flushing the entire airplane with Clorox between flights.
    - notahacker 3y ago
      The rails would be fun, I guess
rdtsc 3y ago
As others mentioned this only works if we assume no seat classes and people not flying in groups. First class, golden carpet diamond supreme customers won't tolerate waiting for someone from the back of the plane to exit. Their head would explode probably and they'll vow to never fly that airline. But overall the problem is that people fly in groups and they like to sit together. Sending the kid out while the parent waits for the next column to deplane will never happen. Should the people in groups wait then, but a good part of the plane will just stay waiting and it's back to the existing algorithm anyway.
mabbo 3y ago
> Unresolved Issues: > How to educate passengers The author vastly overestimates peoples willingness to do literally anything that benefits the group rather than themselves. It does not matter if every single person goes through a six week course on why this system is better: at least 20% will still ignore it to get themselves off the plane sooner. "I have a connection! I'm in a hurry! My Mom is waiting for me!". You want a better system? Design one that works best when everyone is greedy and maximizing their own benefit.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  This is why I think it's important to emphasize the raw number of lives saved. There are winners and losers in both systems, so important to focus on the lives saved by adopting something now. We'd need strong social penalties for any deviant action that blocks the aisle.
graypegg 3y ago
Honestly I wonder how much time could be saved on an ultra low cost airline by just permanently locking the above head compartments that people have to stand in the aisle to use. That seems like the biggest hassle. You could even up-charge for above head storage, but only allow seats at the tail of the plane to choose that upgrade. They board first, and they deplane last, ideally holding up no one. This sounds like hell but hey… if it saves a few bucks a seat on a really short flight because they can deplane in 5 minutes… I’d be for it.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I don't think those are structural. So I think you could even remove vast majority of them entirely. Saving in weight thus in fuel.
drewg123 3y ago
The big problem is getting bags out of the overheads. So I think the best way to get people off planes quickly would be to prevent as many people as possible from carrying on luggage. There are 2 reasons people use carry-ons rather than checked bags. First, because its cheaper for people w/o status, and second because they're worried about the airline loosing their luggage, and/or they don't want to wait for their bags. To negate the first reason for carry-ons using a carrot + stick approach, I'd offer 2 free checked bags to everyone regardless of status, along with charging $100 or more per carry-on. The second reason might be harder. The airlines would need to re-negotiate deals with their credit card company partners (suddenly the free checked back with the Delta Amex plat. card doesn't mean anything) and change their frequent flier programs, and they'd need to get better at bag handling in general.
- danparsonson 3y ago
  There's also option three - fear of damage or theft. Short of a guarantee that my baggage will be handled by a generously paid individual who will treat it with the tenderness of a lover, I'd rather take care of my laptop, camera + lens, etc. myself.
- frankus 3y ago
  Or you could have a rule that people without overhead baggage get to deplane before everyone else.
  - drewg123 3y ago
    I like this. Just lock the overheads for the first few minutes after the boarding door opens.. I wish there was an airline simulator game.
- kelnos 3y ago
  "Checked luggage is lost luggage" has been my mantra for over a decade. I never ever ever check a bag unless a flight attendant requires me to. Obviously everyone's needs are different, but I'm fine with a carry-on for any length of trip. After 1.5-2 weeks I may need to do laundry, but that's fine. There are probably solutions to the problem of it taking too long for people to pull their bags from the overhead bins.
roland35 3y ago
There is a great video from CGP Grey about the similar problem of boarding an airplane: https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo Unfortunately, having flown many times, I just don't see humans ever being able to self organize to this degree, especially at the end of a flight!
londons_explore 3y ago
I have been on flights where passengers are still finding their seats and arguing about overhead baggage locations while the plane is on the runway - and now you have the air traffic controllers moaning at the pilots (why aren't you taking off! You only have a 120 second slot!), the pilots moaning at the cabin crew, the cabin crew moaning at that one family who just can't decide what order to sit down, and dad of the family moaning at the daughter to sit next to her brother and stop complaining. Ryanair even seems to have a way to communicate this. "cabin secure" means everyone is following the rules. "cabin secure, kinda" means we're gonna break the rules and hope everyone sits down before takeoff.
deleted 3y ago
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ccamrobertson 3y ago
I love this because it's exactly the thing that an enraged engineer who is stuck in the last row waiting to get off a plane would create -- just a little naive given airline incentives, couples, families and the limits of human patience :) I would much rather if all planes had a second staircase at the back, jet bridges aren't needed. That, or let people check luggage for free again so they don't need to manhandle carry-ons. My guess is that airports also prefer a slower release of passengers -- it means customs lines and bathrooms aren't immediately saturated.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  Let's fix all those other flow bottlenecks too :)
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Is there actually a reason we cannot have two jet bridges? I have a bias for jet bridges because they generally seem to lead straight to the gate whereas at airports that use stairs it seems like I typically have to get on some bus (FRA, KEF, LAX) first or walk very far (PDX, SEATEC), since stairs are only at the furthest out gates.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It’s hard to get to the rear doors without making the whole thing take up more space (getting over, around, or under the wings is the problem).
uudecoded 3y ago
This is a fine simulation, and, as described, it does not account for overhead baggage handling, and as mentioned in other comments: families traveling together. If you have ever taken a commercial flight, you have seen it: the individual that needs two people to team up (or one highly capable one) and lift up or down their 40-50 lbs (~20 kg) roller from the overhead. Half the time, their help is in their party, but it slows things down. I would estimate that this happens at least once every 4 rows on a fully occupied 6 seat wide aircraft. Given this, forbidding passengers to bring carry ons aboard that they can't overhead lift themselves would be the only way to speed things up regardless of boarding/deboarding strategy. Is that practical? Probably not.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Just stop charging for checked bags and you resolve a significant percentage of the problem.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Many people -- myself included -- will not check bags regardless. I don't want to risk my luggage getting lost or damaged, and I don't want to stand around for 15-30 minutes waiting at baggage claim after my flight. After a return flight, I'm usually at home by the time my bags would start coming out if I checked them.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Exactly - they should charge for carryon bags and give checked for free, because apparently the desire is for carryon.
fferen 3y ago
Idea: deplane by row. Each row leaves when a light in that row turns on. An algorithm decides when to turn them on based on several factors: keeping large groups together, expected speed of deplaning (eg. elderly may be slower), current occupancy of the aisle. Advantage: should be very fast, easy to follow, groups stay together.
yodon 3y ago
Reducing passenger loading and unloading times (also called "Turn Times" in the industry) is a surprisingly hard problem that has been and continues to be heavily studied. Field studies watching actual passengers loading actual planes (as opposed to computer simulations of theoretical "people" loading theoretical planes) frequently show the fastest loading when passengers are lined up randomly, ahead of any of the more seemingly "intelligent" approaches that work great in computer simulations. If the "best practice" algorithms can't even beat the random algorithm in a field study, that's a sign this is a much harder and much messier problem than it appears to be. Just about any google search, like "airplane passenger loading research", will return more than a dozen theoretical and field studies on the first page of hits, including: [0]The Role of Computer Simulation in Reducing Airplane Turn Time, https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_01/textonly/t01txt.html https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_01/texto... [1]A Simulation Study Regarding Different Aircraft Boarding Strategies, https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/19651/1450145.pdf https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/19651/145014... [2]Analysis of Airplane Boarding Times, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220244330_Analysis_of_Airplane_Boarding_Times https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220244330_Analysis_... [3]Efficient Aircraft Boarding Strategies, https://labs.engineering.asu.edu/ilpil/research/efficient-aircraft-boarding-strategies/ https://labs.engineering.asu.edu/ilpil/research/efficient-ai... [4]Passengers boarding airplanes: we’re doing it wrong, https://theconversation.com/passengers-boarding-airplanes-were-doing-it-wrong-33615 https://theconversation.com/passengers-boarding-airplanes-we... [5]The Best Way to Board a Plane, https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html [6]Loading an Airliner Is Rocket Science, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/business/loading-an-airliner-is-rocket-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/business/loading-an-airli... [7]Comparative Study of Aircraft Boarding Strategies Using Cellular Discrete Event Simulation, https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/4/4/57 https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/4/4/57 [8]Intelligent Boarding Modelling and Evaluation: A Simulation-Based Approach, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jat/2021/9973336/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jat/2021/9973336/ [9]Improving airplane boarding boarding time: a review, a field study and an experiment with a new way of hand luggage stowing, https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=ijaaa https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&co... [10]A Comparison of Algorithms That Estimate the Effectiveness of Commercial Airline Boarding Strategies, https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=edt https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&co... [11]The Mathematics of Aircraft Boardingg, https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_06.html https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_06.htm... (among many others)
ninjinxo 3y ago
Better off watching CGP Grey's video "The Better Boarding Method Airlines Won't Use" which has more discussion of the topic, more simulations, and puts forward better methods that are either faster or allow families to remain grouped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo This is basically https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0733 https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0733 but differs to the paper in that it doesn't consider: alternating odd-and-even row disembarkment, which would give passengers more aisle space to potentially speed-up luggage handling.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I recommend not reading it. It made me a less happy traveller.
bdcravens 3y ago
Ignores idea that overhead bags sometimes end up behind the row. Even if you didn't put it there, stewards have the authority to move them around, and often will to accommodate other bags.
dave333 3y ago
Hard to see such a complex sequence working. Maybe there could be a "Aisle passengers without carry on baggage (just a purse perhaps)" exit first call. Then follow with the normal row by row exit. This would allow people who want a fast exit to achieve one.
borland 3y ago
Has this guy ever been on any actual planes? His "Status Quo" model is completely unlike any of the planes I've ever been on. It's easy to improve over a fake strawman
- avidiax 3y ago
  I assume that the author has been on planes enough to think about this and make a website with a simulation. It seems fairly realistic to me. People in rows toward the front step into the aisle as soon as possible to gather their carry-ons. This blocks everyone rearward that already has their belongings and is in the aisle from deplaning.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    Unloaders will yield to a non-zero average of waiting passengers. Unloading passengers in fore rows can predict, time, and exploit gaps in passing back row passengers such that they can unload without causing slowdown (in this way full and flush in non-optimal). Its really not that realistic.
    - very_good_man 3y ago
      These little real world improvements are available in both systems and do not impact the overall conclusion.
      - jayd16 3y ago
        Exploiting gaps and streaming out passengers into the isle is antithetical to fill and flush. It can't be added or it changes the entire concept.
        very_good_man 3y ago
        The simulation currently encodes an average 2 second gap between passengers in the deplaning aisle - in theory you could shoot in when a passenger with a longer minbuffer is near you. This can be done so long as it does not cause accordion-style congestion in the aisle.
srcreigh 3y ago
The simulation is overly simplistic. If someone in row 3 finishes their bags, the other people in row 3 don’t always hold up the line for the rest of the plane. - some people prefer to sit and wait - some people let others through before blocking the aisle Anyway, I think “let some people through before you get your bags” is also way easier for people to understand.
cratermoon 3y ago
Every once in a while these ideas for quicker, more efficient boarding of commercial passenger flights come around, and every time I look at them and think how well they work if you assume the passengers are perfectly spherical cattle.
- bombcar 3y ago
  There’s rumors of a Boeing engineer who went nuts and began designing systems for sedating the passengers beforehand and shipping them all in the prone position. An obvious easy improvement would be to move the doors to just above or before the wings, so you could drain from two sides at once.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
It is absurd to imagine that the passenger in the first row window seat gives a flying fuck about the disembarking time of the last passenger, and then build a model on that absurdity and present it as a serious suggestion.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  I think in practice, if 1F could sneak out without blocking the aisle, it doesn't matter. The true important thing is that the aisle not be blocked. The aisle space is the limited resource. There are even more "lassiez-faire" versions of this simulation that could somehow try to model "unregimented" standing. Might be worth doing.
beders 3y ago
Works well when done with robots. Now simulate it with humans who really want to get off that flying toilet that has been their home for 12 hours. No amount of education will suffice.
riffic 3y ago
you actually expect people to abide by this? people default to the "f you, I've got mine" mentality so there's no way this will work.
burnte 3y ago
I've never seen a plane where there's exactly one person in the entire aisle and everyone else waits. Never. So yeah, this is way better than a method that doesn't happen.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  This happens constantly during deplaning? I think this is a little quirk of how the animation is rendering. There are "little people" standing in the rows behind whoever is currently gathering belongings.
  - burnte 3y ago
    Yes, but no one waits for the guy in front of them to completely exit the plan before they walk down the aisle. It's always the entire line moves and people are always getting in the line. Never does row 12 wait for row 12 to be totally off the plane before standing and getting in the aisle. Row 13 is about 6 inches behind row 12 as they all walk out of the airplane. The only difference in real life between this proposed optimal is that in this design, you intentionally call out aisle, middle, window, while in the real world all the aisle people stand up automatically without being told. I'm saying his plan is already what's in the world just less planned and rigorous. But I've never been on a full plane where the aisle is empty as much as in the straw man simulation in this one.
    - very_good_man 3y ago
      So what do you think the real number of people who can fit in the aisle per row? 1.2? 1.5? 2?
      - burnte 3y ago
        Based on every single airplane I've ever seen or been on, with bags I'd say about 0.8 times an many people as there are rows, plus about 4 people between the front row and the exit door. On a Southwest 737 with 24 rows, that works out to about 23 people. I've never seen deplaning be the hold up, it's boarding that takes forever. But getting people to follow complicated high-speed boarding plans is like herding cats.
redhale 3y ago
Unfortunately this is just about as useful as economic theories that rely on perfectly rational consumers. Good on paper, worthless in the face of human nature.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  There's a great deal of imperfection and slack baked into this simulation. I invite you to read the source code. In it you'll see that I explicitly afford for slack in the walk and belongings-gathering steps.
  - redhale 3y ago
    That's a good start. You also need bake in the fact that 20% of the people will ignore this system and attempt to exit out of order because they're in a rush / they are "important" / they don't give a flip, which will then have a domino effect.
gooseyard 3y ago
competitive de-planing would be an amazing sport
- very_good_man 3y ago
  It would be cool to see how fast a marching band, say, could exit a plane.
WesternWind 3y ago
Seems like it ignores people traveling with others (like children and disabled folks) who need assistance.
- very_good_man 3y ago
  No it doesn't. This objection is addressed directly multiple times in the repo and in the explanation.
  - pavon 3y ago
    No the objection isn't addressed, it is waved away.
frogpelt 3y ago
It will never work. Deplaning always uses the greedy algorithm because the people in the front will not let the people in the back off before them.
Ilasky 3y ago
When I was in Colombia, the thing that jarred me the most about flying was that people waited for their turn to get out of their seats. It was a block system (e.g., rows 1-5, then 6-10, etc.) Honestly, it was refreshing compared to everyone jumping out of their seats and then trying to bolt to the front of the plane to get off as fast as possible.
tednugent 3y ago
People don't need to stay together when they know there's nowhere to go. The question is whether airlines could communicate the value of this new method to induce compliance and not have to use some enforcement mechanism, or some other forms of carrots and sticks
Guvante 3y ago
Unloading is pretty fast. Loading is the slow part. However efficient loading doesn't make passengers happy. Priority boarding is worth an extra fee from some passengers and adds several minutes to boarding time. https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo for a bit more about various options and the reason it is all moot.
aj7 3y ago
Suppose someone doesn’t rise and leave in formation? Suppose the rich people in row 1 on the window decide they aren’t waiting? Easier to herd cats.
more_corn 3y ago
Just eliminate baggage fees. Deplaning is significantly faster when there’s no disincentive for checked baggage.

82 points by very_good_man 3y ago

I have "invented" a system that I believe reduces aircraft deplaning time by ~50% source code at: www.github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush

sodellicious1 3y ago

This looks incredibly cool, you are surely a very good man

muffinator3000 3y ago

Clever

glitcher 3y ago

The problem is that families sit in rows together, not usually in columns. And in busy airports it's not very ideal to get split up from your travel partners, especially if they are young, old, need assistance, etc.

very_good_man 3y ago
I believe the response to this objection is to just have the groups wait for later "flush"es / make "trades" with strangers who would otherwise exit in later waves.
- bhaney 3y ago
  That's a lot of extra coordination to add to a method that already depends on an awful lot of coordination.
ubj 3y ago
Second this point, especially when flying with young children. But I imagine that slight modifications could be made to get a hybrid approach.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Have y'all flown recently, or ever??? I feel it's hard enough these days to get people on planes to be fully clothed, semi-sober, and to refrain from violence. And somehow we're all going to coordinate perfectly to get this complicated choreography to work?
btilly 3y ago
This is what I came to say. The proposal is obviously written by someone who is single and travels alone.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  > Unresolved Issues: > How to accommodate the elderly, people with children, and groups. Guys, you have to read the article at least. It's stated in the "further discussion" section so at least add something more than just repeating the topic. Or, I suppose, rewritten in the vernacular of this site: "This comment is obviously written by someone who didn't read the proposal properly".
  - btilly 3y ago
    Your judgement is wrong. I had read that. I retain my opinion of the article. They ignore the elderly, families, and groups. Which are a large portion of travelers. Plus they acknowledge that they are creating passenger conflicts, and don't address that. Coming up with a better proposal than this is trivial. Here goes. During flight, lock the overhead bins. When deplaneing, those without overhead luggage go first, from first to last row as now. This makes sense because they generally walk faster because they have less stuff. Those with overhead luggage have to wait for the steward or stewardess to unlock the overhead bins following the fast group, and then exit from last row to first. Therefore those who are slow to get things out of bins, do not slow others. Those needing assistance wait until the very end, as now. Getting stuff out of bins is the gating factor here. And so there is no passenger conflict about the fast people leaving first, because the others are waiting on the bins being unlocked, then for people behind them to pass. And groups get to leave together. There you go. A faster approach than now. With fewer problems.
    - very_good_man 3y ago
      While I reject your condescending tone, locking the overheads is possibly a good idea but requires major equipment upgrades. I do not believe locking mechanisms in the overhead compartments are currently installed. Controls to instantly lock/unlock such systems remotely by one attendant, thousands of times, reliably, is yet another challenge. Better to engineer a solution that requires no new equipment.

gobills2024 3y ago

Brilliant! I Would love to see this improvement.

nsedlet 3y ago

This is great. This is mentioned in the discussion topics section ("modeling randomness in gathering belongings"). But I wonder what the distribution of baggage-gathering time looks like? I'd guess pretty positively skewed, i.e. most people are pretty quick but then a few people take a long time or a really long time. The speed of the flush stage of a particular wave is capped at the slowest person in that wave.

nradov 3y ago

What's the point? I'm going to have to wait for my checked bags anyway. Passengers who really care about deplaning quickly should just select seats near the front.

very_good_man 3y ago
I have calculated this would save between 50 and 150 human life-equivalents of time per year. You can see this calculation if you scroll to the bottom of the simulation page.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Sure, but it doesn’t add up to much useful time per person… Aggregate time saving across large numbers of people just seems like a fairly useless measure in general. To take it to an extreme, if you saved ten seconds in something everybody in the world does once or twice, you’d have saved a very large number of person years in aggregate but made basically no meaningful improvement to any individual’s life…
Scoundreller 3y ago
I’d think airlines would really want to put pax at the front that have tight connections (before or after). Unsure if any think this far ahead though. But I also think they should put healthy 25 year olds in the emergency exit row for… emergencies, but they’d rather sell those seats to someone that’s often the poorest candidate to execute in an emergency.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Since planes rarely fall directly out of the sky, I wonder if there’s documented cases of “oh it’s an actual emergency” and people swapping seats.
parchley 3y ago
You don't know that up front, e.g. if your plane is late and you need to hurry to a connecting flight.

tuckerwatts 3y ago

[dead]

lwhsiao 3y ago

CGP Grey did a great YouTube video on this several years ago, and why airlines won't use it: https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo Note that this is from a boarding, not deplaning viewpoint, but the concepts are similar.

sergiotapia 3y ago

In all of my flights I've seen that people allow the row in front of them to deplane first. It's just courtesy I've seen. Is this similar to "fill and flush"?

very_good_man 3y ago
That is modeled as "status quo" - this unfortunately leads to waste of the scarce aisle real estate, a resource that is better used in "Fill & Flush."

candiddevmike 3y ago

Airlines would bastardize this by doing it by class then column, as you can't have steerage riff raff get off before double platinum diamond medallion clearly superior than you first class. In that model, would it faster or slower for someone in the middle of end of the plane?

throw7 3y ago

"How First Class is handled." That's by far the easiest issue to handle: don't change a thing... they get off first exactly how they do now.

manuelabeledo 3y ago

This would defeat the economics of class seats, which is way more important for the airline than getting people out the aircraft, and it does not address the obvious issue with carry on luggage, which is an even bigger problem in single aisle aircrafts. And more obviously, the level of coordination required to make it work is just not worth it. Families flying together, babies, people with disabilities, etc., none are considered in the model.

very_good_man 3y ago
-First Class can keep getting off first, you still get the benefits if you apply this to Coach -Groups can wait for later "Flush" es - there is flexibility since I think you can fit a little more than one person in the aisle per row.
- jghn 3y ago
  These days coach has multiple tiers and they're not necessarily in a uniform location. Whereas first class is always in the front
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > First Class can keep getting off first, you still get the benefits if you apply this to Coach Domestic flights on single aisle aircrafts, have several classes (first, extra, etc.), with different price ranges. Even emergency exit seats come with some attached benefits, like priority boarding. Good luck telling customers that they paid extra for an emergency window seat, but have to wait until more than half of the plane have de-boarded to exit.
  - piva00 3y ago
    > Good luck telling customers that they paid extra for an emergency window seat, but have to wait until more than half of the plane have de-boarded to exit. That's exactly what already happens (at least in Europe), you don't get priority to de-board if you bought seats with extra leg room on the emergency exits, you have to wait.

LatteLazy 3y ago

This is slower than the current system because column 2 can not stand up (or prepare to exit) until others have completely exited. Also you cannot exit with the people you sit next too (like your toddler who will have to make their own way off?). And that's assuming anyone actually wants to minimise average time. Airlines don't. Neither do most passengers.

epups 3y ago

Unfortunately, no solution that relies on this level of coordination will ever work. We cannot even get people to not block the corridor randomly when boarding or offboarding, enforcing a routine like this is not going to happen. Sorry for being negative, I like that you came up with something clever. I've seen some similar attempts to make boarding more efficient. I just fly way too frequently and I think the world is not ready for this yet.

bombcar 3y ago
You could try to incentivize it - give free checked bags to those with window seats, but charge them for carry ons, and give carry ons for free to the aisle seats.

crazygringo 3y ago

This is clever thinking, but we've been running airlines for so long now, I can't help but wonder if this has already been tried, and if there were issues with it. Potentical obstacles I can imagine off the top of my head: - Will people even obey? What if half the people from the wrong side get up too? After a long tiring flight, will that anger people on the correct side and lead to fights? Having to show your ticket to prove you were in the right column to get off is not very customer-friendly - What about families with children, couples, and groups in general? People want to stay together. It doesn't matter if this is rational or not, it's what people want to feel safe and not anxious - Is it really even going to make much of a difference? In my experience, people are already mostly grabbing their bags quickly, simultaneously while the rows immediately ahead are starting to exit And of course, while this can in theory save perhaps a couple minutes for domestic passengers with only a carry-on, even in theory it saves no time at all for anyone who still has to go through a crowded passport control or wait for checked baggage.

londons_explore 3y ago
Getting off the plane is already fairly quick. Everyone wants to get going, usually the plane is empty in 5 minutes or less. I think it would help with getting onto the plane. Filling the plane can easily take 20 minutes - which in a half hour turnaround is often the critical path. The challenge here is you need to get people to enter the plane door in a very precise order. Just 10% of people ignoring instructions probably eliminates most/all of the benefits. Groups who don't want to sit apart or board the plane apart have to go either first or last.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Getting people to board in a certain order isn't particularly difficult. Southwest does it already, even if they only use it to... make sitting in a grounded plane a perk of checking in early? I'm actually not sure why they do it.
  - londons_explore 3y ago

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frereubu 3y ago

Seems great in princinple, but I'm not sure this would work when coming up against human behaviour. It's as much as the stewards can do to stop some people charging down the aisle the minute the plane comes to a standstill, let alone communicating something this nuanced to everyone so they understand. It also means that families who are travelling together would need to deplane separately, which can screw up things in terms of helping each other with bags, and also wouldn't work with families who have multiple kids of an age where they need to walk with their parents. It feels like the kind of fragile system where you'd end up with so many exceptions that it becomes potentially even more messy as you'd need to communicate those exceptions and people would need to understand them.

netsharc 3y ago
That's probably why OP said it's open for discussion. But yeah herding (isn't the correct term flight attendants and not stewards?) the passengers would be difficult. Perhaps the procedure should be, if everyone in your group is holding all their belongings - either in the aisle or standing in the footspace of an aisle seat (so rows C and D in a 3-3 configuration), then they can join the deplaning wave. But if you're standing in the aisle but one from your group is still crouched in a window seat and will need to grab their bag, and you don't want to abandon them, then you don't occupy the aisle go back to your (presumably aisle-) seat and wait for the next wave/go into an empty row so the crouched passenger can stand in row C/D, and wait for the wave to finish so they can grab their bag.

mirekrusin 3y ago

"great" if you travel with kids/family.

deleted 3y ago

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mirekrusin 3y ago

Is getting off passengers a bottleneck in the whole thing?

usefulcat 3y ago
Yes, for anyone concerned about missing a subsequent connecting flight.
- bombcar 3y ago
  If you’re worried about that tell the stewardess before your descent begins, they can prioritize you, up to and including moving you to first class just before landing.
- mirekrusin 3y ago
  Flight connections are not synchronized at that time resolution. If they care about it then allocating seats closer to exit for people with connected flights would make more difference.

notahacker 3y ago

The simulation of the status quo makes the assumption that aisle seat passengers wait until the row ahead of them is clear before collecting their luggage, nobody ever manages to squeeze past someone collecting their luggage, nobody in a middle or window seat is ever able to retrieve or be given their luggage until the aisle opposite them is completely clear, nobody ever walks past someone in an aisle or middle seat that hasn't collected their luggage yet etc... Suffice to say, this is not my experience of boarding and leaving aircraft.

very_good_man 3y ago
The simulation assumes that ONE person in the status quo has a 0 second assemble belongings step, and just waits "minBuffer" time - so in the simulation on average this is 2 second delay rather than 5: https://github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush/blob/fc0fa73b5879cef375b5fbf7b171512928c9a7c0/src/models/Plane.js#L111 https://github.com/josephecombs/fill-flush/blob/fc0fa73b5879...

Jeff_Brown 3y ago

What if your bag is far from your seat?

netsharc 3y ago
That feels like an American thing, I fly in Europe and my luggage is almost always above my head or across the aisle. Do American fliers put it in the first space they see in the overhead luggage?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- antonyt 3y ago
  In my American experience, flights these days are almost always completely full, and almost every passenger is bringing both an under-seat and overhead-bin carry-on item. The last 10% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage near their seats. The last 5% or so of boarders are often left with no overhead storage available at all. "Put it in the first space you see" is often explicitly an instruction that the cabin crew gives to boarders as overhead space starts dwindling. Passengers aren't doing it out of preference.
- TillE 3y ago
  EasyJet (ie, in Europe) is constantly packed, and people who board later frequently need to find space elsewhere for their bag, because the space near them has already been taken.

mmastrac 3y ago

Airlines added baggage fees to capture more revenue. Passengers started bringing more carry-on luggage as a result, filling up the overhead bins. It now takes longer to gather ultra-heavy, overlarge carry-ons from the bins to exit the plane, affecting exit times. Stop nickel-and-diming for luggage and focus on efficiency gains like gate-checked small luggage. Add front and back exits to every gate ramp to improve boarding and unboarding.

owlbite 3y ago

I've often wondered whether they could "containerize" passengers by having the seating as a whole remove from the plane. People then have all the time in the world to get seated outbound, and additional space to deplane at their own speed inbound. You could even come up with a system for putting luggage directly under their seats obviating the need to collect it separately. (It would of course be a massive redesign of planes and airports, so probably not an easy starter).

notahacker 3y ago
So passengers crowd into narrow tubes a bit earlier, and then the narrow tubes are winched into the aircraft with the sort of painstaking precision that takes several minutes? Even assuming airframes could be redesigned to make this possible [at zero cost, without implications for structural integrity or operational complexity of the resulting aircraft] I'm not sure who benefits here?
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Not sure if it needs to be a tube. Maybe the seats could be on a rail that slides into the airplane. Having to move the nose and tail of the plane up for this also brings us closer to my dream of flushing the entire airplane with Clorox between flights.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    The rails would be fun, I guess

rdtsc 3y ago

As others mentioned this only works if we assume no seat classes and people not flying in groups. First class, golden carpet diamond supreme customers won't tolerate waiting for someone from the back of the plane to exit. Their head would explode probably and they'll vow to never fly that airline. But overall the problem is that people fly in groups and they like to sit together. Sending the kid out while the parent waits for the next column to deplane will never happen. Should the people in groups wait then, but a good part of the plane will just stay waiting and it's back to the existing algorithm anyway.

mabbo 3y ago

> Unresolved Issues: > How to educate passengers The author vastly overestimates peoples willingness to do literally anything that benefits the group rather than themselves. It does not matter if every single person goes through a six week course on why this system is better: at least 20% will still ignore it to get themselves off the plane sooner. "I have a connection! I'm in a hurry! My Mom is waiting for me!". You want a better system? Design one that works best when everyone is greedy and maximizing their own benefit.

very_good_man 3y ago
This is why I think it's important to emphasize the raw number of lives saved. There are winners and losers in both systems, so important to focus on the lives saved by adopting something now. We'd need strong social penalties for any deviant action that blocks the aisle.

graypegg 3y ago

Honestly I wonder how much time could be saved on an ultra low cost airline by just permanently locking the above head compartments that people have to stand in the aisle to use. That seems like the biggest hassle. You could even up-charge for above head storage, but only allow seats at the tail of the plane to choose that upgrade. They board first, and they deplane last, ideally holding up no one. This sounds like hell but hey… if it saves a few bucks a seat on a really short flight because they can deplane in 5 minutes… I’d be for it.

Ekaros 3y ago
I don't think those are structural. So I think you could even remove vast majority of them entirely. Saving in weight thus in fuel.

drewg123 3y ago

The big problem is getting bags out of the overheads. So I think the best way to get people off planes quickly would be to prevent as many people as possible from carrying on luggage. There are 2 reasons people use carry-ons rather than checked bags. First, because its cheaper for people w/o status, and second because they're worried about the airline loosing their luggage, and/or they don't want to wait for their bags. To negate the first reason for carry-ons using a carrot + stick approach, I'd offer 2 free checked bags to everyone regardless of status, along with charging $100 or more per carry-on. The second reason might be harder. The airlines would need to re-negotiate deals with their credit card company partners (suddenly the free checked back with the Delta Amex plat. card doesn't mean anything) and change their frequent flier programs, and they'd need to get better at bag handling in general.

danparsonson 3y ago
There's also option three - fear of damage or theft. Short of a guarantee that my baggage will be handled by a generously paid individual who will treat it with the tenderness of a lover, I'd rather take care of my laptop, camera + lens, etc. myself.
frankus 3y ago
Or you could have a rule that people without overhead baggage get to deplane before everyone else.
- drewg123 3y ago
  I like this. Just lock the overheads for the first few minutes after the boarding door opens.. I wish there was an airline simulator game.
kelnos 3y ago
"Checked luggage is lost luggage" has been my mantra for over a decade. I never ever ever check a bag unless a flight attendant requires me to. Obviously everyone's needs are different, but I'm fine with a carry-on for any length of trip. After 1.5-2 weeks I may need to do laundry, but that's fine. There are probably solutions to the problem of it taking too long for people to pull their bags from the overhead bins.

roland35 3y ago

There is a great video from CGP Grey about the similar problem of boarding an airplane: https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo Unfortunately, having flown many times, I just don't see humans ever being able to self organize to this degree, especially at the end of a flight!

londons_explore 3y ago

I have been on flights where passengers are still finding their seats and arguing about overhead baggage locations while the plane is on the runway - and now you have the air traffic controllers moaning at the pilots (why aren't you taking off! You only have a 120 second slot!), the pilots moaning at the cabin crew, the cabin crew moaning at that one family who just can't decide what order to sit down, and dad of the family moaning at the daughter to sit next to her brother and stop complaining. Ryanair even seems to have a way to communicate this. "cabin secure" means everyone is following the rules. "cabin secure, kinda" means we're gonna break the rules and hope everyone sits down before takeoff.

deleted 3y ago

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ccamrobertson 3y ago

I love this because it's exactly the thing that an enraged engineer who is stuck in the last row waiting to get off a plane would create -- just a little naive given airline incentives, couples, families and the limits of human patience :) I would much rather if all planes had a second staircase at the back, jet bridges aren't needed. That, or let people check luggage for free again so they don't need to manhandle carry-ons. My guess is that airports also prefer a slower release of passengers -- it means customs lines and bathrooms aren't immediately saturated.

very_good_man 3y ago
Let's fix all those other flow bottlenecks too :)
ajmurmann 3y ago
Is there actually a reason we cannot have two jet bridges? I have a bias for jet bridges because they generally seem to lead straight to the gate whereas at airports that use stairs it seems like I typically have to get on some bus (FRA, KEF, LAX) first or walk very far (PDX, SEATEC), since stairs are only at the furthest out gates.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It’s hard to get to the rear doors without making the whole thing take up more space (getting over, around, or under the wings is the problem).

uudecoded 3y ago

This is a fine simulation, and, as described, it does not account for overhead baggage handling, and as mentioned in other comments: families traveling together. If you have ever taken a commercial flight, you have seen it: the individual that needs two people to team up (or one highly capable one) and lift up or down their 40-50 lbs (~20 kg) roller from the overhead. Half the time, their help is in their party, but it slows things down. I would estimate that this happens at least once every 4 rows on a fully occupied 6 seat wide aircraft. Given this, forbidding passengers to bring carry ons aboard that they can't overhead lift themselves would be the only way to speed things up regardless of boarding/deboarding strategy. Is that practical? Probably not.

bombcar 3y ago
Just stop charging for checked bags and you resolve a significant percentage of the problem.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Many people -- myself included -- will not check bags regardless. I don't want to risk my luggage getting lost or damaged, and I don't want to stand around for 15-30 minutes waiting at baggage claim after my flight. After a return flight, I'm usually at home by the time my bags would start coming out if I checked them.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Exactly - they should charge for carryon bags and give checked for free, because apparently the desire is for carryon.

fferen 3y ago

Idea: deplane by row. Each row leaves when a light in that row turns on. An algorithm decides when to turn them on based on several factors: keeping large groups together, expected speed of deplaning (eg. elderly may be slower), current occupancy of the aisle. Advantage: should be very fast, easy to follow, groups stay together.

yodon 3y ago

Reducing passenger loading and unloading times (also called "Turn Times" in the industry) is a surprisingly hard problem that has been and continues to be heavily studied. Field studies watching actual passengers loading actual planes (as opposed to computer simulations of theoretical "people" loading theoretical planes) frequently show the fastest loading when passengers are lined up randomly, ahead of any of the more seemingly "intelligent" approaches that work great in computer simulations. If the "best practice" algorithms can't even beat the random algorithm in a field study, that's a sign this is a much harder and much messier problem than it appears to be. Just about any google search, like "airplane passenger loading research", will return more than a dozen theoretical and field studies on the first page of hits, including: [0]The Role of Computer Simulation in Reducing Airplane Turn Time, https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_01/textonly/t01txt.html https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_01/texto... [1]A Simulation Study Regarding Different Aircraft Boarding Strategies, https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/19651/1450145.pdf https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/19651/145014... [2]Analysis of Airplane Boarding Times, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220244330_Analysis_of_Airplane_Boarding_Times https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220244330_Analysis_... [3]Efficient Aircraft Boarding Strategies, https://labs.engineering.asu.edu/ilpil/research/efficient-aircraft-boarding-strategies/ https://labs.engineering.asu.edu/ilpil/research/efficient-ai... [4]Passengers boarding airplanes: we’re doing it wrong, https://theconversation.com/passengers-boarding-airplanes-were-doing-it-wrong-33615 https://theconversation.com/passengers-boarding-airplanes-we... [5]The Best Way to Board a Plane, https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html [6]Loading an Airliner Is Rocket Science, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/business/loading-an-airliner-is-rocket-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/business/loading-an-airli... [7]Comparative Study of Aircraft Boarding Strategies Using Cellular Discrete Event Simulation, https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/4/4/57 https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/4/4/57 [8]Intelligent Boarding Modelling and Evaluation: A Simulation-Based Approach, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jat/2021/9973336/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jat/2021/9973336/ [9]Improving airplane boarding boarding time: a review, a field study and an experiment with a new way of hand luggage stowing, https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=ijaaa https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&co... [10]A Comparison of Algorithms That Estimate the Effectiveness of Commercial Airline Boarding Strategies, https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=edt https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&co... [11]The Mathematics of Aircraft Boardingg, https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_06.html https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_06.htm... (among many others)

ninjinxo 3y ago

Better off watching CGP Grey's video "The Better Boarding Method Airlines Won't Use" which has more discussion of the topic, more simulations, and puts forward better methods that are either faster or allow families to remain grouped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo This is basically https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0733 https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0733 but differs to the paper in that it doesn't consider: alternating odd-and-even row disembarkment, which would give passengers more aisle space to potentially speed-up luggage handling.

ajmurmann 3y ago
I recommend not reading it. It made me a less happy traveller.

bdcravens 3y ago

Ignores idea that overhead bags sometimes end up behind the row. Even if you didn't put it there, stewards have the authority to move them around, and often will to accommodate other bags.

dave333 3y ago

Hard to see such a complex sequence working. Maybe there could be a "Aisle passengers without carry on baggage (just a purse perhaps)" exit first call. Then follow with the normal row by row exit. This would allow people who want a fast exit to achieve one.

borland 3y ago

Has this guy ever been on any actual planes? His "Status Quo" model is completely unlike any of the planes I've ever been on. It's easy to improve over a fake strawman

avidiax 3y ago
I assume that the author has been on planes enough to think about this and make a website with a simulation. It seems fairly realistic to me. People in rows toward the front step into the aisle as soon as possible to gather their carry-ons. This blocks everyone rearward that already has their belongings and is in the aisle from deplaning.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Unloaders will yield to a non-zero average of waiting passengers. Unloading passengers in fore rows can predict, time, and exploit gaps in passing back row passengers such that they can unload without causing slowdown (in this way full and flush in non-optimal). Its really not that realistic.
  - very_good_man 3y ago
    These little real world improvements are available in both systems and do not impact the overall conclusion.
    - jayd16 3y ago
      Exploiting gaps and streaming out passengers into the isle is antithetical to fill and flush. It can't be added or it changes the entire concept.
      - very_good_man 3y ago
        The simulation currently encodes an average 2 second gap between passengers in the deplaning aisle - in theory you could shoot in when a passenger with a longer minbuffer is near you. This can be done so long as it does not cause accordion-style congestion in the aisle.

srcreigh 3y ago

The simulation is overly simplistic. If someone in row 3 finishes their bags, the other people in row 3 don’t always hold up the line for the rest of the plane. - some people prefer to sit and wait - some people let others through before blocking the aisle Anyway, I think “let some people through before you get your bags” is also way easier for people to understand.

cratermoon 3y ago

Every once in a while these ideas for quicker, more efficient boarding of commercial passenger flights come around, and every time I look at them and think how well they work if you assume the passengers are perfectly spherical cattle.

bombcar 3y ago
There’s rumors of a Boeing engineer who went nuts and began designing systems for sedating the passengers beforehand and shipping them all in the prone position. An obvious easy improvement would be to move the doors to just above or before the wings, so you could drain from two sides at once.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

It is absurd to imagine that the passenger in the first row window seat gives a flying fuck about the disembarking time of the last passenger, and then build a model on that absurdity and present it as a serious suggestion.

very_good_man 3y ago
I think in practice, if 1F could sneak out without blocking the aisle, it doesn't matter. The true important thing is that the aisle not be blocked. The aisle space is the limited resource. There are even more "lassiez-faire" versions of this simulation that could somehow try to model "unregimented" standing. Might be worth doing.

beders 3y ago

Works well when done with robots. Now simulate it with humans who really want to get off that flying toilet that has been their home for 12 hours. No amount of education will suffice.

riffic 3y ago

you actually expect people to abide by this? people default to the "f you, I've got mine" mentality so there's no way this will work.

burnte 3y ago

I've never seen a plane where there's exactly one person in the entire aisle and everyone else waits. Never. So yeah, this is way better than a method that doesn't happen.

very_good_man 3y ago
This happens constantly during deplaning? I think this is a little quirk of how the animation is rendering. There are "little people" standing in the rows behind whoever is currently gathering belongings.
- burnte 3y ago
  Yes, but no one waits for the guy in front of them to completely exit the plan before they walk down the aisle. It's always the entire line moves and people are always getting in the line. Never does row 12 wait for row 12 to be totally off the plane before standing and getting in the aisle. Row 13 is about 6 inches behind row 12 as they all walk out of the airplane. The only difference in real life between this proposed optimal is that in this design, you intentionally call out aisle, middle, window, while in the real world all the aisle people stand up automatically without being told. I'm saying his plan is already what's in the world just less planned and rigorous. But I've never been on a full plane where the aisle is empty as much as in the straw man simulation in this one.
  - very_good_man 3y ago
    So what do you think the real number of people who can fit in the aisle per row? 1.2? 1.5? 2?
    - burnte 3y ago
      Based on every single airplane I've ever seen or been on, with bags I'd say about 0.8 times an many people as there are rows, plus about 4 people between the front row and the exit door. On a Southwest 737 with 24 rows, that works out to about 23 people. I've never seen deplaning be the hold up, it's boarding that takes forever. But getting people to follow complicated high-speed boarding plans is like herding cats.

redhale 3y ago

Unfortunately this is just about as useful as economic theories that rely on perfectly rational consumers. Good on paper, worthless in the face of human nature.

very_good_man 3y ago
There's a great deal of imperfection and slack baked into this simulation. I invite you to read the source code. In it you'll see that I explicitly afford for slack in the walk and belongings-gathering steps.
- redhale 3y ago
  That's a good start. You also need bake in the fact that 20% of the people will ignore this system and attempt to exit out of order because they're in a rush / they are "important" / they don't give a flip, which will then have a domino effect.

gooseyard 3y ago

competitive de-planing would be an amazing sport

very_good_man 3y ago
It would be cool to see how fast a marching band, say, could exit a plane.

WesternWind 3y ago

Seems like it ignores people traveling with others (like children and disabled folks) who need assistance.

very_good_man 3y ago
No it doesn't. This objection is addressed directly multiple times in the repo and in the explanation.
- pavon 3y ago
  No the objection isn't addressed, it is waved away.

frogpelt 3y ago

It will never work. Deplaning always uses the greedy algorithm because the people in the front will not let the people in the back off before them.

Ilasky 3y ago

When I was in Colombia, the thing that jarred me the most about flying was that people waited for their turn to get out of their seats. It was a block system (e.g., rows 1-5, then 6-10, etc.) Honestly, it was refreshing compared to everyone jumping out of their seats and then trying to bolt to the front of the plane to get off as fast as possible.

tednugent 3y ago

People don't need to stay together when they know there's nowhere to go. The question is whether airlines could communicate the value of this new method to induce compliance and not have to use some enforcement mechanism, or some other forms of carrots and sticks

Guvante 3y ago

Unloading is pretty fast. Loading is the slow part. However efficient loading doesn't make passengers happy. Priority boarding is worth an extra fee from some passengers and adds several minutes to boarding time. https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo for a bit more about various options and the reason it is all moot.

aj7 3y ago

Suppose someone doesn’t rise and leave in formation? Suppose the rich people in row 1 on the window decide they aren’t waiting? Easier to herd cats.

more_corn 3y ago

Just eliminate baggage fees. Deplaning is significantly faster when there’s no disincentive for checked baggage.