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(Page 2 of 2)
“That’s very fast,” said Mr. Swierenga, the consultant, adding that there are no industry benchmarks on turnaround time. “It depends on the size of the aircraft,” he said. “A 747 jumbo can take hours.”
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Graphic
Now Boarding. Listen Carefully.
Graphic
Seating, Rows... Southwest’s turnaround time is “below those of our competitors,” said a Southwest spokeswoman, Beth Harbin, who added that the range is 35 minutes to an hour for most airlines.
Southwest’s system is also cheap and uncomplicated, requiring almost no exotic technology. Customers get assigned to Groups A, B or C on their boarding passes, in the order in which the passenger checks in. Groups are called in alphabetical order, with passengers rushing to occupy the seat of their choice.
Though some Southwest passengers liken it to a cattle car, they are generally good sports. But in blogs and other forums they grouse that they have to be at the airport early to get the best seats.
To show off the effectiveness of its ** system, Southwest’s scheduling department has come up with a what-if model, in which turnarounds take five minutes longer. To keep its current schedules of 2,773 daily turns for its fleet of 461 737s, the airline would need 18 additional aircraft costing a total of $972 million — not including the cost of crews and maintenance workers.
Southwest has quietly done tests of so-called dual jet bridges in Austin and Dallas to accelerate boarding by loading passengers through two doors at once. But the bridges proved to be unreliable. The airline does use a different kind of dual bridge in Albany, but has found it only marginally better than single bridges.
Last summer Southwest began experimenting with assigned seating, Wilma-style boarding and other loading methods on flights out of San Diego because of the variety of short, medium and long-haul flights there.
So far, passengers polled by Southwest are evenly divided between leaving open-seating alone or changing it. “Our fliers are passionate about what they like — for instance, the fact they can book at the last minute without losing out on a good seat,” said Ms. Harbin, the Southwest spokeswoman. “But after going electronic with boarding passes, we cleared at least the technology hurdle of how to assign seats.” Southwest is adamant about not altering its boarding system until at least 2008.
Northwest, which has traditional assigned seating, recently replaced its back-to-front loading with Southwest-style open boarding. Some corporate travel managers have complained that their fliers are getting the Southwest open-seating treatment even though they are paying full fare. But Northwest, like most major airlines, provides a separate boarding lane for elite business travelers, even when they are late to the gate. And it says its system reduces boarding time by seven minutes.
So which boarding technique works best? There are skeptics who scoff at all the hand-wringing and research experiments and contend that all these attempts at saving time are a waste of time.
“The airlines are looking for a new time-saving idea they can believe in and reduce it to a computer code,” said Robert W. Mann, an aviation consultant in Port Washington, N.Y. “Just say, ‘It’s time to go’ and random boarding will get the same result as any systematization.”
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