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.”
