United sucks so bad now, but they have a hub 10 minutes from my house so I just suck it up and use them. As crappy as they are, they’re better than a layover.
As far as boarding is concerned, it will always be slow as long as people are involved. Just because you can step out of the aisle, slam your bag into the overhead, and sit down on 5 seconds doesn’t mean anything because that other person who needs 10 minutes to figure out which end of the bag goes in the hole is always going to be the bottleneck.
Commuter flights can be really nice for this. If you’re flying with regular commuters who aren’t lugging around a weeks worth of clothes in an overstuffed carryon and are traveling alone, boarding the plane goes lightning fast.
General boarding works from the outside in and back to front. So lone travelers in the back with window seats get boarded first (after all of the other privileged groups). Then people in middle seats, then aisle seats. Groups of people are boarded based on the lowest priority of their group (so if you take all three seats then you get stuck with the aisle boarders). The number of zones varies depending on the size of the plane. So that lone traveler who has a window seat near the front and needs forever to get situated and can’t get out of the aisle for some reason will still bottleneck the entire boarding process on something like a 737.
We always bring our stroller through, because it is a GODSEND having it right at the door to the plane when you arrive (in places where that’s allowed, any way). Because I don’t want to have to carry a sleeping almost-30-pound toddler from the plane all the way through to the luggage pick up, especially when you have to go through passport control first and wait in line for 30 minutes. Noooooo thank you.
Edit: and also, often times the checked stroller ends up being the LAST thing delivered (because it’s handled as “oversized baggage”), so you’re sitting around with all your other bags, waiting for the damn stroller (and sometimes it’s the opposite, where it ends up being the FIRST thing delivered to the luggage pickup area)
Of course, the infrastructure limits the speed at which the aircraft can be boarded too. I’m old enough to remember the days before jetways. Sufficiently large planes used the doors at the forward end and at the aft end for boarding thereby nearly doubling the speed.
yes, but no one wants to sit in the back of the plane, because it takes longer to deplane.
So you have to force people to the back of the plane, which has it’s own problems.
Southwest doesn’t have seat classes, is obsessive about turnaround time, and does’t force people to the back. They do sell line priority. So apparently, (some) people do value being at the front of the line, but the time saved by forcing everyone else to the back is balanced by some other cost.
and yes, the fact that folks over-pay for first class is fine by me as well.
The old navy comment was more of a joke, that is why it was a bit off.
But too the part of my comment that made sense. So many comments here are about what a huge market demand there is for making flying less of a pain in your ass. You could say in general that cable as one of those hated services has created a similar market. We all sit around dreaming about being entertained without the feeling we are being inconvenienced and treated like a sucker. The cable companies want to sell us that solution. I am sure there are other great examples of nusance corporations that sell an alternative to themselves.
But to join back in on complaining about airlines… I got a last minute flight out of Columbus one time. I think it was a United flight. I was in zone 5. The flight was mostly business travelers. When they boarded the plane there were no passengers in zones 3 or 4. and zone 2 only had a few. Zone 5 people had to stand there and stare at a line of no people, because we lacked the “status” to board at that time…
We have a super-cheap umbrella stroller that we gate check if needed but they’ve been really good about running it up the skyway by the time we get assembled and out the door.
Airline executives would like to be greedy, but it really seems like they don’t have that luxury. The whole industry is like a sinkhole for failed managers, except for a few outliers like Southwestern. Every year the experience of flying coach gets worse and worse and the finances of the major carriers grow more and more precarious. The reason for this is not increased managerial acumen.
Uh…OR, as if often the case, the long line is long because of real reasons - the left lane closes up ahead, or you CAN’T actually make a legal right turn from there, etc. When the line is long, maybe only the “idiots” line up thinking it’s long so it must be the proper lane to be in, but only the ASSHOLES drive down the open lane only to (9/10 times) have to signal back into the long line, but now at the front because - oops! they didn’t realize they had to be in the lane with the long line! Soooo sorry, guys, you mind if I just wedge in there anyway, oh thanks, wave (but hee hee I skipped the long line, suckers!).
My children aren’t small anymore, but I always thought that (at AA) this was entirely up to the gate agent. They might have done it at the outbound airport and not done it at all on the way back. I’ve also had them wave us thru (on Southwest) without otherwise making an announcement about it.
I am usually making some kind of absurdly fast connection, and I never put anything in the overhead bins. I leap up out of my aisle seat as fast as humanly possible because every person wrestling a rolly bag out of the overhead bins is one more person between me, the world’s fastest bathroom break, some kind of terrible fast food, and my ass in the seat on the next plane before they close the doors.
I check a bag because my shoulder won’t put up with hauling my stuff with me and lifting it into the overhead bin. But I’m frequently rushing to disembark because I have a connection to make.
You may be right. I’ve never flown American with my kids (and never will again, ugh), but this was the first airline I’ve ever flown (since I started flying with my kids, anyway, so in the last 5 years) that didn’t pre-board families with small kids. In general I tend to stay away from American airlines (as a group, not the specific company) in general unless I’m flying specifically to America (and I try to avoid all connecting flights through there as well, due to the security hassles). Lesson learned, I guess.
