Which boarding method gets everyone seated fastest?
Two aisles, three cabins and a second jet bridge at door two. A wide-body is a different boarding problem from a 737, and the methods that win on one do not always win on the other.
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 twin-aisle cabin gives every passenger a choice of aisle and halves the depth of any queue. In this model that alone makes the 787 faster to board per passenger than a single-aisle jet of the same length. The bigger lever is the door plan. Try the two-bridge plan, L1 for the premium cabin and L2 for the rest, with passengers at L2 turning forward or aft depending on their row.
On the two-bridge plan the Steffen and Cincin orderings are nearly identical in this model (6:40 against 6:39 on seeds 20260801 to 20260806). The gap opens on plans whose doors are far apart: this page opens with forward plus aft doors, where the Steffen method, which counts rows from the nose, sends the wrong passengers in first at the aft door and the door-aware Cincin ordering lands minutes ahead. Compare the two on the forward door only and they are identical, which is the point.
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.