The airplane boarding process has certainly room for improvement. One of the improvement possibilities is seat finding. To improve seat finding a Boeing 737 was equipped with spotlights above the seats that starts to become more intense when you come closer. To test the effect 20 passengers boarded with and without light. The effects on time were recorded and a questionnaire was used to gain insight on the experience. In both situations the boarding with light was 2 s faster. However, the difference was not significant. The experience data were hard to interpret as a part of the participants were not aware that there was a light. The study shows that there is potential in using the light, but further research is needed to study the effect on a flight where many passengers board at the same time.

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The airplane (de)boarding process is not organized optimally. The goal of this paper is to search for improvement possibilities. In this paper literature is reviewed, boarding characteristics are studied in a field study and a pilot study with a new way of hand luggage stowing is performed. Computer simulations indicate that there are more efficient boarding methods than those currently in use, like the reverse pyramid method which starts window seat columns in the back and ends with aisle seat columns in the front. The literature also shows that hand luggage stowing in the overhead lockers can block other passengers increasing the boarding time. Also, the field observations and the pilot test indicate that hand luggage stowing could block the aisle and is one of the main elements in boarding that influences passenger experience and boarding time. Training and preparing the boarding process could potentially reduce the boarding time by 3-4 minutes, but further research is needed to prove this.@en