HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET ALL PASSENGERS SEATED?
of customer planning. With about 1,900 flights per day on American, that adds up.
What’s to stop a passenger from moving up in line by promising to put a personal item under the seat, then stuffing it in the overhead bin anyway?
“It would be a lie to say that never happens,” says Tessa Letren, an American gate agent at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. “We can’t always police that.”
Still, Letren supports the new policy, which she says cuts the amount of time that planes spend on the ground between flights.
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American Airlines uses a back-tofront system for boarding coach passengers after it takes care of elite customers. It says it takes: » About 25 minutes to board passengers on a smaller, narrowbody plane such as a Boeing 737, » About 35 minutes on a bigger plane such as a Boeing 777. made his job easier.
Anything to tidy up the gate area will help, in the view of Yosief Ghirmai, an auditor for defense contractor Raytheon Co. in Frisco, Texas, who says foreign airlines make boarding much easier for elite-level frequent fliers like himself.
“The international airlines respect the priority boarding system,” Ghirmai says, citing Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific as an example. “Here, you have to fight to get to the priority boarding line — all the bags, all the kids. The concept (in the U.S.) is the same, but the execution is much better over there.”
Selita Garcia of Chicago wondered why anybody in the front of the plane would want to board first.
“We’re always bumping into all those business-class people — if it’s not my purse, then I’m hitting them with my bag,” says Garcia, who manages a doctor’s office and was taking her grandson to vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, recently. “Why let them on first? The plane is not taking off until everybody is on the plane.”
Others like to get settled before takeoff.
Kausalya Palavesam, a marketing manager for Texas Instruments who was coming back from a conference in Atlanta, says about 15 passengers on her American flight took the airline’s offer to check their carry-on bags at the gate and board sooner.
“Why not?” she says. “There won’t be room for the bag (in the overhead bin) anyway.”