Delta’s Answer to High-Volume Boarding? Load the Carry-on First
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APEX Insight: Delta Air Lines will be loading hand luggage before boarding passengers to speed the pre-flight procedure in what may be the busiest summer for air travel.
Instead of boarding a flight with carry-on in hand, Delta Air Lines passengers may arrive at their seats with their luggage already stowed above their heads.
Early Valet, a seasonal service launched by Delta, will see that passenger hand luggage is collected and stowed in the appropriate overhead bin by airline staff prior to boarding. The idea is to prevent clogging the aircraft aisle with passengers wrestling their bags into overhead bins, who also unintentionally bog down traffic behind them.
“Their bag will be specially tagged, similar to what you see at a hotel for room delivery, said Morgan Durrant, spokesman for Delta, “and then placed above a customer’s seat based on their request assignment.”
With this summer forecasted to be the busiest ever for air travel in the US, it’s no wonder airlines are deliberating on how to speed up the pre-flight process: a whopping 222 million travelers and 332,000 international flights are expected to fly.
Delta tested preloading carry-on on flights departing from Atlanta and Los Angeles last year. Early Valet, which runs from June 1 through August 31, will be in effect at the airline’s busiest hubs in Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Saint Paul (Minnesota) and Seattle, and will service a few dozen flights with the highest numbers of vacationers.
Boarding Bummer
Speeding up the boarding process has been an ongoing airline conundrum that has yet to be solved by either mathematicians or scientists. It causes flight delays, missed connections and upset passengers. A study by Northern Illinois University found that airlines lose $30 for every minute a flight is delayed. Multiply this by the one out of four US flights that are 15 minutes late, and the loss plummets into the millions.
Boarding-Test Dummies
Mythbusters put the issue to the test by experimenting with the various plane boarding methods: by class, from back-to-front, from outside-in, and open boarding. Open boarding, practiced by Southwest Airlines since 1971, proved to be the quickest method, but participants also said it was the least enjoyable. Most preferred was the outside-in method that boards passengers in the order of window, middle, and aisle seats.
Then there is Flying Carpet, the patented product that claims to be “the fastest way to fill a plane.” The eight-foot by 26-foot carpet, roughly the size of a large parking spot, shows a graphical layout of a typical single-aisle cabin, so passengers can arrange themselves according to their assigned seats at the gate, and flow through the jetway in orderly fashion.
But if the answer to quicker boarding times is in the bag, as Delta sees it, there’s an alternative that involves a calculated choreography that doubles as a balancing act. Engineering student Alexander Kelly and School of Business professor John Milne of Clarkson University suggest filling a plane row by row, according to the number of bags a passenger is carrying. Not only is this method three percent faster than the average boarding method, it factors in weight distribution among the overhead bins.
And if Delta’s Early Valet doesn’t succeed at its primary goal of speeding-up boarding, there is a secondary benefit.
“Having airline staff pre-load carry-on bags must be of interest, particularly for passengers who don’t find it easy to put their bags into the overhead lockers,” Nick Gates, product portfolio director, SITA told The Independent. “…such as passengers with children and those that find it physically challenging to lift their bags.”