Which boarding method gets everyone seated fastest?
The 737-800 at its 189-seat certified maximum in 3-3 (the simulator numbers rows 1 to 32 without the skipped 13), exit rows 16 and 17, and a window seat at 11A with no window. Ryanair boards it through both doors when the apron allows, which is where door plans matter most.
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.
A full 737-800 in a single-class 3-3 layout is the hardest single-aisle case in this simulator: 189 passengers, one aisle, and Ryanair's carry-on rules that put a bag in most overhead bins. The preset uses the airline's typical load factor and heavy luggage. Switch the door plan to both doors to see the turnaround Ryanair actually aims for, with airstairs at the tail and a bridge or stairs at the nose.
With two doors open the door-aware Cincin method pulls well ahead of Steffen, because half the passengers now walk in from the back. Turn on Model overhead-bin capacity to watch the bins nearest each door fill first and later passengers hunt for space, then gate-check when there is none.
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.