Abstract
The use of apron buses has become a common practice at many European airports. Previous studies related to airplane boarding rarely apply when apron buses are used, leaving airlines with no well-researched option except to use the random boarding method. In this paper, we test the time to complete boarding a two-door airplane using various boarding methods with two apron buses. These methods were inspired by the classical outside-in, back-to-front, and reverse-pyramid methods considering the limited number of boarding groups corresponding to the limited number of apron buses used for transporting passengers from the terminal to the aircraft. Unlike earlier publications, we test these methods under partial aircraft occupancy. Furthermore, we test the boarding methods under conditions involving: different passenger occupancy rates, different luggage situations, and with two types of seating assignments—random and based upon passenger seating preferences—by considering the advantages brought by the symmetric layout of the aircraft. Experimental results indicate that the best performing method can reduce the boarding time by up to 38.6% compared to the time resulting from the random boarding method. When the airplane is partially occupied, the best performing methods are reverse pyramid–A, hybrid–A, and hybrid–B, all with similar performances.
Highlights
The use of apron buses for passengers’ transport from the airport terminal to the airplane has become a common boarding process step at European airports, such as Frankfurt, Paris, London, Amsterdam Schipol, Salzburg, Madrid, Munich, among others, as the number of flights is continually increasing while the capacity of the airports to support a higher number of passengers only partially follows this increase [1]
We summarize only these methods because they contain the core ideas that are used in the methods that apply when apron buses are used
A series of methods have been developed in the literature to reduce the time it takes to complete passenger boarding of an airplane
Summary
The use of apron buses for passengers’ transport from the airport terminal to the airplane has become a common boarding process step at European airports, such as Frankfurt, Paris, London, Amsterdam Schipol, Salzburg, Madrid, Munich, among others, as the number of flights is continually increasing while the capacity of the airports to support a higher number of passengers only partially follows this increase [1]. In June 2019, Schipol Airport reported 43,343 air transport movements, with an increase of 0.4% compared to the same month of the previous year, while the number of passengers increased by 1.8%, reaching 6,502,588 persons [2]. Are the large airports, with thousands of flights per month, the target for the apron buses industry, but even small airports use this type of boarding instead of letting the passengers walk directly from the gate to the airplane. Even when jet bridges are available, a particular airplane may be too small to use these bridges.
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