Comment on “Time needed to board an airplane: A power law and the structure behind it”

Abstract

Frette and Hemmer [Phys. Rev. E 85, 011130 (2012)] recently showed that for a simple model for the boarding of an airplane, the mean time to board scales as a power law with the number of passengers N and the exponent is less than 1. They note that this scaling leads to the prediction that the "back-to-front" strategy, where passengers are divided into groups from contiguous ranges of rows and each group is allowed to board in turn from back to front once the previous group has found their seats, has a longer boarding time than would a single group. Here I extend their results to a larger number of passengers using a sampling approach and explore a scenario where the queue is presorted into groups from back to front, but allowed to enter the plane as soon as they can. I show that the power law dependence on passenger numbers is different for large N and that there is a boarding time reduction for presorted groups, with a power law dependence on the number of presorted groups.