This is flat wrong. Southwest has said that adding 5 minutes average to their turn time would cost them $972 million more a year (not counting crew costs) and require 18 more planes. to maintain their service level NYT article (granted it is old, but the order of magnitude is likely still right)

The distinction that matters is long haul vs short haul. For trans-pacific flights turn time is basically irrelevant, but for short haul flights the 30 minutes on the ground at either end start to matter a lot. Say you have a plane on a route where it is an hour gate to gate. If you are rotating crews you can run at least 12 legs a day (southwest averages ~6 turns which means 8 legs per 737 per day as of 2006 so some are likely hitting this number). If you now take 5 minutes off each turn time that gets you an extra flight per day per plane which means an extra flight of profit with out the overhead of more planes.

Oh, if only. Ryanair’s (the most successful budget airline, IIRC) charge you if you want to check baggage, necessitating you carry all your belongings in the cabin (as one only flies Ryanair if you’re very cheap, and the price of baggage check is quite often more expensive than the ticket).

Disappointing? Yes.

Surprising? Sadly, no.

As far as improving the time, what I would do would be to give some benefit, perhaps a cash discount, or points, or a better meal, or whatever, to those passengers who checked one bag. The idea is that you need to make flying more expensive for people who insist on loading all their personal belongings into the cabin.

The paper is a little rough due to the whole thing (from seeing the problem, writing the code, and the paper) was done in 4 days Hopefully a cleaner version will end up on the arxiv some time in the near future. (We had been planning to do it anyway, but this is just extra motivation)

Lawrence B. Crowell

A simple search on Google Scholar (e.g. airplane passenger boarding) will throw up research papers and patents from the early part of the decade and later part of the last. Isn’t science supposed to be about building on the shoulders of giants, not re-inventing the wheel?

From what I can tell… it seems this is a complete re-implementation of “Reducing passenger boarding time in airplanes: A simulation based approach” by Van Landeghem & Beuselinck in 2000 (i.e. do lots of random samples, and pick the best one! Not a particularly scalable solution). But with a lot less rigour.

This proposed solution is also ridiculously difficult to implement in real life… what would have really impressed me would have been a simple heuristic approach that improves on the current situation, but yet offers no additional complications to ground staff operations. Instead, this paper investigates a wholly unworkable near-optimal solution.

Tuning one’s shower in some hotels may turn into a challenging coordination game with imperfect information. The temperature sensitivity increases with the number of agents, making the problem possibly unlearnable. Because there is in practice a finite number of possible tap positions, identical agents are unlikely to reach even approximately their favorite water temperature. Heterogeneity allows some agents to reach much better temperatures, at the cost of higher risk.