The Inefficiency and Idiocy of Plane Boarding

Every plane in this country, possibly in the world, is boarded incorrectly.

Anyone who’s ever been on a plane knows the system. The first class folks with the most expensive seats board first, followed by all us plebeians in descending order of economic status. The logic is that those with more money to spend for a bit more leg and elbow room are more valuable customers, more valuable people, and are therefore more deserving to get on the plane first. The problem with this logic, besides being an unethical reinforcement of capitalist class hierarchy, is that it is completely illogical if your goal is to get a plane off the runway and to its destination as quickly as possible. If that is the goal of airlines, they are failing utterly.

Boarding a plane, if you’re not in the rarified class of preferred passengers in the first dozen or so rows, means having to wade past them, and everyone else, and all of their bags and crap, to get to your seat further back in the plane with the other suckers riding in the air travel equivalent of steerage. And it takes forever. So much time is wasted, shuffling slowly through the aisles, squeezing past everyone whose seat is ahead of yours.

The obvious solution is to board planes in reverse order. If your seat is in the back, you should get on first so that you won’t be in anyone else’s way. Boarding would be far more efficient and planes could take off more quickly.

I don’t even understand why people want to get on planes ahead of other people. Why would you want to sit on a plane longer? Even in the best seats, planes are cramped and uncomfortable cages. Prison vacuum tubes circulating diseased air. Personally, the less time I spend on a plane, the better. I’d like to be the last one on and first one off. One of the only reasons that I could see wanting to board early is to ensure that there’s space for my bag in the overhead bin. But that wouldn’t be an issue if there was actually sufficient space above each row to fit the bags of the people sitting there and if that space was reserved for them.

The greatest offense is that the airlines all have to know this. If it’s obvious to occasional fliers how asinine their system is, those that work to enforce it every day must. They know, yet they choose not to fix it. The craziest part being, from their point of view, that they are potentially losing money, as inefficiency and delays mean fewer flights and decreased profits. They choose to maintain a system which is less efficient, more unpleasant, and stupid, out of an arbitrary loyalty to a nonsensical wealth-class hierarchy.