Jump to main content


Search the Sun
Dream Teams Games Mobile Holiday Deals Betting Sun Money Archive Sun Poker Sun shop offers
News
Sun News Queen's speech blanks Camilla
Maj snubbus horribilis for Royal couple
Sport
Sport Pires admits: It's le crunch
Ace could be off after Gunners talks this week
Bizarre
Bizarre: Oasis bruvs in bust-up Sun Online's showbiz quiz
Testing your knowlege of celebs in 2005
Life
Life: Uni babes bring some cheer Sun-ta visits sick children
Special delivery from Santa on the Sun's bus
Sun Woman
Sun Woman Honey I shrunk with the kid
Merle dragged dad along to shed weight
Gizmo
Gizmo It's the Gizmo re-phew of 2005
12 festive fillies look back over gadget year
Page 3
Page 3 Zoe, aged 24,
from London
See loads more girls on our super cyber site
Competitions
Competitions Whiz around town in style
Win your very own Napster Vespa scooter
Great offers from The Sun Online
Sun weekly email Contact Us
It's just plane stupid
 FULL NEWS INDEX

By SUN ONLINE REPORTER

EINSTEIN’S relativity theory has been used to arrive at a conclusion most air passengers would agree with - that it takes far too long to board aircraft.

Using space-time theories, university researchers have concluded that boarding by numbers is literally a waste of time.

Airlines would be better off following the example of low-cost carriers who don't give seat numbers and let passengers sit where they like.

Even when seats are pre-assigned, airlines should just not bother to board in stages, as the row-by-row system just makes the process longer.

Released today, the research on boarding has come from a team led by Dr Eitan Bachmat of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Dr Bachmat said: “Back-to-front boarding is bad because it is designed for cardboard-thin passengers, or for the spacious surroundings of the first-class compartment.

“If there were to be any kind of controlled boarding to try to make it quicker, the only thing that might help would be getting people who have seats closest to the window to board first. But there is no need to play with the rows. It doesn’t matter which rows get on first.”

Dr Bachmat stumbled accross the theory when researching how to make computers run quicker.

Dr Bachmat said: “It dawned on us that we could use the same geometry that appears in relativity theory.

“Nobody used it for anything else outside physics, it just kind of stood
there for 100 years. Well, it turned out that this airline boarding problem and my disk drive work are modelled by the same mathematics.”

GIVE THE SUN A STORY AND EARN £s
Search for in ARCHIVE SHOP PHOTOSALES Search the Sun Search for loan deals here
  HOME Home page TOP OF PAGE Page top BACK Page back NEWS | SPORT | BIZARRE | LIFE | FUN | TV | MOVIES | COMPS  
© 2005 News Group Newspapers Ltd. "The Sun", "Sun", and "Sun Online" are registered trademarks or trade names of News Group Newspapers Limited. This service is provided on News Group Newspapers' Standard Terms and Conditions in accordance with our Privacy Policy. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material, visit our Syndication site. View our online Press Pack here. For other inquiries, Contact Us.