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Re:Airplane boarding simulations by shalmanese on Friday May 04, 2012 @11:31AM (#3928813)
Surely airlines can just do this empirically rather than rely on simulations. Why not just A/B test a bunch of different boarding methods on different flights and time what works the best?
Re:Airplane boarding simulations by bdunbar on Friday May 04, 2012 @02:50PM (#3929771)
Expense.

Every method of boarding will require training the flight crew, ground crews at the airport. A non-trivial expense to change over from A to B. And then back.

Departure times are measured down to the minute. Miss your time and much activity downstream is affected - pax connections, gate use at destination airport, flights downstream.

And so on. I'm sure that they do use A/B testing or something like that ... but they do a whole lot of simulatin' first.