Northwest Airlines this week said it would no longer require passengers in coach to board by row. Instead, travelers can find their seats at their leisure. The airline says the new procedure will save time.
Please discuss…
My thoughts:
Absolutely king ludicrous! So now the guy in row 30 has to wait for the guy in row 7 to get his oversized duffel bag squeezed into the overhead bin. Then after the guy in row 30 gets by, the one in row 18 will be blocking the guy in row 32…
THEN you’re going to have more people who are not happy with their seat assignments take whatever seat they want, causing the musical chairs effect - so they might as well just do away with seat assignments anyway and just do a cattle call!
This is analogous to slamming on the brakes to see if the car will go faster! I think they’ll learn very quickly that it will cause delays, and they’ll go back to the tried & true method within a week!
Ummm…Wasn’t the whole board-by-row thing designed to save time?? Now they think that reversing that will save time?? People are going to be tripping over each other trying to get to their seats.
There’s only one point that I see in this that will save a minimal amount of time, and that’s when they call out the rows at the rear of the a/c, and 150 people are left standing there for 5 minutes while 4 people board. Like I said, that won’t save much time in that situation, and the time saved will be made up waiting in the aisle(s) for the guy NeedleNose mentioned w/ the oversized bag.
I wonder what NWA’s flight attendant union thinks of this…
The only thought I have about this (that maybe NWA was thinking) was that people don’t always follow the rules. I always get annoyed when I’m in the middle of the plane and I see people in the first 6 rows who didn’t get up when they were looking for the people that are slow/have small children.
Here is the story from one site:
MINNEAPOLIS Boarding a Northwest Airlines flight is now a little easier, and faster.
The nations fifth-largest carrier has done away with row-by-row boarding in coach after discovering that planes filled up faster when passengers could simply get on when theyre ready. The change knocked an average of 5 minutes to 10 minutes off boarding times, the airline said.
Northwest still boards special-needs and first-class passengers first, and still uses assigned seats.
Northwest tested the new boarding procedure in several markets on different types of aircraft. In all cases, it was faster, said spokesman Dean Breest.
So it sounds like they’re not just doing this haphazardly.
The story locovaca posted says the testing is done, and that it works. I Googled a line in the story he posted and it reveals many news organizations posting the same story.
Still, I remain skeptical. I’ll believe that it works when a great majority of airlines adopt the procedure.
Besides, we need to be more concerned with the content of a message rather than the vessel it’s presented in. After all, a thrown brick is an effective communication, but I doubt any of us would appreciate being the recipient.
Hey dami…if you come across an hour or so to kill, read the transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder (posted by dbaker) regarding the SWA1248 accident. There’s 4 or 5 quotes from Airplane used by the pilots during the flight…You’d think (I’d think anyway) that 2 experienced airline pilots would have heard every punchline from that movie to the point where they could’t stand it, but, apparently, it never gets old.
Never thought “Stripes” was that funny, nor Bill Murray either. Same goes for Chris Tucker as I find him grating at best. Although his character in “The Fifth Element” fit him to a T, I had a lot of trouble accepting him in the two “Rush Hour” movies.
Quotable movies for me are “Airplane”, anything by the Monty Python gang and “Caddyshack”. I know that between the two of us my son and I have “Holy Grail” pretty much memorized. (Yes, I’ve ruined the boy! He has my sick, twisted sense of humor.)
Hmmmm… methinks we have drifted a wee bit off-topic! Damn tides.
