Which boarding method gets everyone seated fastest?
Everybody is seated, the seatbelt sign goes off, and the question is how long until the cabin is empty. Row by row is what happens; the alternatives are what people argue about in the aisle.
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.
Deplaning is boarding run backwards, with two differences. Bags come down faster than they go up, and in this model each passenger takes two to three seconds to step through the door onto the bridge, about twenty to thirty a minute, so the door becomes the bottleneck within a minute whatever happens in the aisle. That is why the free-for-all, for all its elbows, is not slower than the polite version in this model: the aisle drains as fast as the door lets it.
Row by row is the slow one. When each row waits for the row ahead to stand, only one row at a time is reaching into the bins and the aisle is empty for most of the run. Alternate rows lets twice as many bins open at once; aisle seats first means nobody waits for a seat-mate. Race all four with two doors open to see how much a second exit is worth.
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.