A Better Passenger Boarding System (BTW, Jetstar Sucks)

   |  The Doctor

TL;DR: The fastest method of loading passengers onto a plane is to group passengers based on the oddness/evenness of their seat row numbers. Board passengers with odd numbered rows through one door, and passengers with even numbered rows through another door.

I went to Melbourne last weekend for GP Melbourne (don’t ask – I lost badly). But I very nearly didn’t get there. My flight was originally at 5pm, so at 2pm, I decided to do a web check-in. To my surprise, I found that Jetstar had changed my flight from 5pm to 11pm without actually telling me. I checked all my email archives, and I had not received any communiques aside from their stupid weekly sales email. I had a dinner meeting in Melbourne at 8, it was unacceptable that I leave Sydney at 11pm. So I called Jetstar, and after a frantic 40 minutes, I managed to get my flight changed to 7pm. I had still missed the meeting though.

Anyway, so I was at the airport, having had 2 hours sleep the previous night, waiting, half asleep for my flight. Then came an announcement – that there was going to be a delay in the flights. I felt slightly frustrated, but I was short of sleep and felt tired, so I didn’t bother. When it came to boarding however, I was surprised, as Jetstar had changed their boarding method. I thought about it for a while and then I tweeted about what I thought to be Jetstar’s inefficient boarding method:

Despite that, I did work on a simulation while on the flight. I fell asleep after the first few lines of code of course, but on my trip back from Melbourne, I completed the code but never actually ran it… until today. You see, I didn’t think about it for a while until yesterday and today, when I received a number of Twitter mentions. I hadn’t checked my twitter mentions earlier, and hadn’t noticed Jetstar actually replied to my tweet:

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airline  airplane  boarding  jetstar  optimization  plane  wait