Editorial: Get shorter queues off the ground

Border control at Auckland International Airport. Photo / Doug Sherring

It's time for airlines to look seriously at speeding up pre-flight processes for long-suffering travellers

As much as airports and airlines like to talk about improving passengers' lot, they rarely deliver. Air travel has long since lost any semblance of glamour, and passengers put up with practices that would have no place in a genuinely customer-friendly industry. Among the worst aspects of this is the queuing to board a plane, the sequel to an equally time-consuming check-in. Surely, it is not too much to expect passengers to have a more pleasant experience.

It says something about airlines' priorities that the latest suggestion to improve matters has come not from them but from researchers at a New York university. Their proposal, released this week, envisages passengers being seated according to the amount of hand luggage they have. The first on board would be seated by the windows, so they would not have to stand to clear the way for those boarding after. According to the researchers from Clarkson University, this method would be about 25 per cent faster than allowing passengers to queue and board at random.

Maybe so, but it will never fly. This is, after all, a procedure that would reward those who carry the most hand luggage, irritating fellow travellers and monopolising overhead lockers in the process. The unintended consequence could well be an increasing number of people carrying an increasing amount of hand luggage to get to the top of the queue and gain a window seat. Such are the shortcomings of schemes devised by engineers, rather than those more attuned to human nature.

Nonetheless, the research did emphasise that boarding queues are getting worse. The speed of boarding has almost halved since the 1960s from about 20 passengers per minute to just nine passengers a minute by 1998. This was the result of travellers responding to increased fees for checking luggage into the hold.

Since then, the problem has surely worsened as aircraft become larger and airlines show little appetite for reining in passengers who flout hand-luggage rules.

This trend should, in itself, have been enough to galvanise airlines. If nothing else, there is the attraction of the potential saving of millions of dollars in costs associated with delayed flights. Perhaps the problem lies in the potentiality of that saving, rather than the immediate and obvious profit that can be derived from self-service facilities. Certainly, there is little to indicate they are much concerned about the queuing they put their passengers through.

Air New Zealand says it has tested boarding people in window seats first, followed by those in middle seats and, finally, those in the aisle, but found its current system to be more efficient. That seems a surprising outcome.

How difficult could it be to introduce practices more sympathetic to passengers? Rather than expecting customers to arrive at the airport several hours before departure, would it not be possible to allot groups a check-in period of, say, 30 minutes duration for certain parts of the plane?

Passengers on a flight would not be queuing at the same time. Similarly, airlines need to do more trials on window/aisle boarding. More obviously still, the use of the rear door to the aircraft, as well as the front, would reduce much of the queuing. That may make life slightly more taxing for the airlines, but don't they always say they want to make things better for their customers?