Which boarding method gets everyone seated fastest?
Rear zones board first, then the next zone forward. It sounds sensible and it is one of the most common conventional approaches. The simulation shows why it is usually slower than a random queue.
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.
Back-to-front feels efficient because nobody walks past a seated passenger to reach their row. The cost is invisible from the gate: everybody in the zone that was just called is heading for the same handful of rows, so they stand in a line in the aisle while one person at a time lifts a bag. The rows in front of them are empty and useless. A random queue spreads passengers along the cabin by accident and ends up faster.
Use the Zones setting to see whether more zones help (they mostly do not) and the door plan to see what happens when back-to-front meets an aft door: the rear passengers then sit down right beside the doorway and block everyone behind them. Racing it against Front-to-Back and Rotating Block shows how much of the slowness is the zone idea itself and how much is the direction.
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.