Which boarding method gets everyone seated fastest?
Nearly five hundred passengers, ten seats across, and five passenger doors on the port side. The A380 is where the door plan stops being a detail and becomes the whole story.
Score: 100 = as fast as the faster of the Steffen and Cincin orderings on this flight and seed · 50 = one seeded random queue · below 50 = slower than that queue.
The simulator models the A380's main-deck economy cabin in 3-4-3 with the premium cabins ahead of it. Through a single door it takes as long to board as you would fear. Emirates' A380 gates at Dubai typically use three bridges, two to the main deck and one to the upper deck. The simulator approximates that with three main-deck doors, each serving a contiguous run of rows with its own queue.
Try the same three-door plan with back-to-front boarding. The rearmost passengers enter at the aftmost door, sit down beside it and block it, so the plan that helps every other method actively hurts this one. The door-aware Cincin method gains the most from a second door. On this preset the third door helps it less, because the premium cabin pins its rows to L1 and leaves the mid door only a handful of rows.
Boarding a full aircraft takes on the order of tens of minutes, and the order in which passengers are called changes that more than anything the crew can do once people are aboard. This is an interactive airplane boarding simulator: pick a cabin, pick a boarding method, and watch every passenger walk in, stow a bag, squeeze past a seated neighbour and sit down, one simulated second at a time.
You can race up to eleven boarding methods side by side on identical passengers, including back-to-front zones, front-to-back, rotating blocks, WILMA (window, middle, aisle), reverse pyramid, the Steffen method, open seating, a realistic airline group order, and a custom rule you build yourself. Thirteen real cabin layouts are included, from a 72-seat ATR 72 turboprop to a 489-seat Airbus A380, along with single and multiple boarding doors, carry-on luggage load, families travelling together, priority boarding and passengers who ignore their group call.
The simulator also runs in reverse. Switch to Deplaning and everybody starts seated: compare row-by-row politeness with a free-for-all, aisle seats first, or alternate rows, and see that in this model the door onto the jet bridge, not the aisle, limits how fast a full cabin empties. My seat takes a seat number and tells you, for every strategy, when you would be called, how long you would stand in the aisle and when you would sit down. Sweep a setting varies occupancy, luggage, families or the share of passengers boarding out of turn across their whole range and charts where the ranking flips. Any race can be recorded as a video with the strategy names and clock captioned, and any result can be shared as a challenge link that dares the recipient to beat your time on the identical flight.
Every run is deterministic: the same seed and settings always produce the same passengers with the same bags and seats, so a difference in the result comes from the queue order alone. The full user guide explains every metric, the mathematics behind each method, and the assumptions the model makes.
This is an educational model rather than an airline operations tool. Published boarding research supports several of the broad patterns it reproduces; the exact times are outputs of this simulation.