The Astrophysicist Who Has a Better Way to Board Airplanes

livemint.com:

Jason Steffen has spent his career trying to crack the deepest mysteries of the universe. He’s an astrophysicist who studies exoplanets orbiting distant stars, dark matter and gravitation. In his spare time, he also tackles another impenetrable riddle of the galaxy.

What is the best way to board airplanes? He’s not the only person trying to answer the question. The most effective way for people to fill a metal tube is a problem that airlines have been trying to solve for decades. For companies that squeeze every drop of profit from their operations, shaving two minutes of boarding time per flight can save countless millions of dollars a year, so of course they’re obsessed with smoothing out this form of turbulence.

Every march down the aisle of a plane is a parade of inefficiency. But the only thing as difficult for airlines as making planes efficient at 35,000 feet is doing it while they’re on the ground. They’re constantly looking for a less awful way, which is why United Airlines is tweaking its boarding process—again.

United recently implemented a system called “Wilma," a rough acronym for its new boarding chronology: window, middle, aisle. Except it’s not new. In fact, the airline boarded coach passengers this way until 2017.

The “L" doesn’t stand for anything, either. But the really odd part about this supposedly better, faster way of boarding a plane is that it could be even faster and better. Just ask Steffen, an associate professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who developed what he says is the optimal boarding strategy and published his findings 15 years ago.