Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Optimal boarding method for airline passengers

This has been one of my open tabs for a while now and I finally got around to reading it. It’s a research study on how to best board airline passengers. Despite popular wisdom, back to front is not all the much faster than front to back (even though probably 50% of airlines go for some variation on this method). The key time consumer, as the paper explains, is the amount of time it takes for passengers to load their luggage. Therefore, back to front gets clogged with people waiting to put luggage away. The paper suggests the key is to properly space people so the most people are loading luggage at the same time. Very interesting.

April 21, 2008