Why Do Airlines Load Their Planes in a Mostly Random Fashion?

Why do airlines load their planes in a mostly random fashion? I get why first class boards separately, but why am I, in seat 18C, placed in loading group 7? Are they trying to make me miserable just to increase alcohol sales? Anyone who’s ridden a bus, van or plane knows that loading back to front is the quickest and most efficient. —Frequent Cryer

Actually, Cryer, back-to-front—which causes traffic jams by forcing everyone in a small area to try to stow their luggage at the same time—is pretty much the least efficient way to board a plane. That doesn’t stop plenty of airlines from using it anyway, however, a fact that probably only increases your suspicion that they only want to make you miserable. Fortunately, it’s not true: They also want to get rich.

The longer a plane is on the ground, the less profit it creates, so the right boarding strategy can be worth big bucks. The most mathematically efficient method, created by astrophysicist Jason Steffen, boards odd-numbered rows separately from even-numbered rows, allowing passengers to access overhead compartments without crowding each other, while also boarding window, middle and aisle passengers in that order so they don’t have to crawl over each other to reach their seats.

Unfortunately, getting 160 passengers to line up in precise mathematical order isn’t practical. However, a surprisingly quick alternative to Steffen’s method is plain old random boarding: Let people get on whenever they want and trust chance to keep them reasonably well dispersed.

An even more efficient variation was Southwest Airlines’ system, in which passengers simply picked whatever seat they wanted as they boarded. This method fit the airline’s quirky branding, but they really did it because it’s faster and got the planes back into the profit-generating air more quickly. I’m using the past tense, however, because Southwest recently switched to assigned seating like everyone else.

Why change to a slower boarding method? Well, one way to make money is to get your planes back in the air quickly, but another way is just to torture your passengers until they give it to you directly. The airlines prefer to call this “monetizing the boarding process.” It basically means charging you extra for priority boarding, seat selection, and anything else that might mitigate the suffering they themselves engineered. The industry sources I consulted didn’t specifically mention alcohol sales as one of these profit drivers, but I daresay you’re onto something.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.