Which boarding method gets everyone seated fastest?
One shuffled line, no groups, no calls. It is the baseline every strategy in this simulator is scored against, and it beats back-to-front more often than not.
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 random queue has a property that zone boarding destroys: at any moment the people in the aisle are scattered along the whole cabin. That means several of them can stow bags at the same time. Its weakness is seat interference, because aisle passengers often sit before the window passenger in the same row arrives. On balance the spread wins, which is why the score here anchors 50 on a random queue and anything below it means the strategy is actively making things worse.
Randomness also has a practical advantage no structured order can offer: it needs no announcements, no group numbers and no compliance. The Board out of turn setting shows how quickly a clever order degrades toward random when passengers ignore their calls.
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.