User:LBird BASc/sandbox/ATK/Seminar6/Power/Power in Airplane Boarding

Context

An airplane in Greece waiting for its passengers to board

Most airlines use a back-to-front boarding strategy in an attempt to maximize efficiency. Most often, passengers will be divided in three groups, and these will enter the airplane separately; first the people sitting in the last 20 rows (in the case of a 60 row airplane), then the group corresponding to the people sitting between rows 20 and 40, and then the passengers of the first 20 rows will board. After all, this seems intuitive, and boarding front to back, for example, would be catastrophically slow. However, for the last 15 years, research has continuously demonstrated that this is not in fact the most efficient way to board an airplane. It has been found that an airline could reduce their turnaround time (the time between arrival and departure) by up to 20 minutes. Given that every second counts in terms of cost in airports for airplanes, why have not most airlines incorporated these new studies in their boarding strategies? To understand why, we need to take an interdisciplinary approach that explains the power inequalities between the appropriate disciplines.

Economics

From an economical point of view, it would be much cheaper for the companies to board using a window-middle-aisle boarding technique, in which first all passengers sitting near the window board, then the middle, then the aisle passengers, as this significantly reduces passenger jams which normally arise. As the aforementioned study states, airplanes could cut their boarding time by up to 20 mins, and considering that the average cost per minute for an airplane stationed at the gate comprises of both infrastructure, security, and landing costs, 20 mins could amount to an extremely significant sum, although no valid research has been done on this.

Psychology

Airlines using the window-middle-aisle technique of boarding risk disorienting passengers, as until now the tradition back to front method has dominated the airline industry. An airline suddenly switching to a new technique could potentially lose more time than the traditional way because we would have to take into account the factor of confusion which would in overall would cause more delays. Psychology tells us that the rationale so characteristic to economics is at fault here because you cannot just assume everyone will suddenly perfectly adapt to change.

Conclusion

This is an example of an interdisciplinary issue caused by power as there is a power imbalance between psychology and economics. Psychology states that the airline shouldn't switch boarding methods while economics says it should. However, as explained in the introduction, we remark that airlines in fact are not changing boarding techniques, which illustrates that in this case psychology has more to say than economics.