The fastest way to board a plane, according to mathematics - Rachel Yang
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After hours of delay, your flight is finally boarding. But as the line grinds to a halt, you can’t help but think — there must be a faster way to board this plane. Mathematicians have been studying this problem for years, devising and testing a range of different boarding methods. Rachel Yang digs into our biggest plane-loading bottlenecks and potential methods to alleviate this travel headache.
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Additional Resources for you to Explore
If you’d like to see diagrams of different boarding methods in action, this link has some for the back-to-front, random, and Steffen’s methods. Curious about where the boarding times reported in this lesson come from? Check out this study which ran computer simulations comparing different boarding methods in an Airbus A320.
Besides the boarding strategies covered in this lesson, many other strategies and variations also exist, such as the reverse pyramid method, which combines the back-to-front and WMA approaches but performs similarly to WMA on its own. To learn more about this method and others, as well as how they compare, check out this article. This article also introduces one proposed practical variation to Steffen’s method called dynamically optimized boarding, which tries to keep groups together.
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Meet The Creators
- Educator
- Rachel Yang
- Director
- Avi Ofer
- Narrator
- Addison Anderson
- Composer
- Cem Misirlioglu, Work Play Work
- Sound Designer
- Cem Misirlioglu, Work Play Work
