# American Airlines Boarding Groups Question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 7, 2017, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-airlines-boarding-groups-question/783984 "2017-04-07T15:24:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2017, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-airlines-boarding-groups-question/783984/21 "2017-04-07T21:29:31Z")
> [@Dinsdale](#): > > So why don’t airlines enforce carry-on regs? Sucks to be the guy who complies, yet doesn’t get to use the space above my seat. > > I still comply, because I figure the ONE time they enforce it, it will be when I have something oversized. But if there are rules that consistently are not enforced, it is very tempting to act as though there are no rules. As I said recently in another thread [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=20108354](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=20108354) the challenge is the airline itself, and the individual gate agent worker bees, are trapped between enforcing the rules which makes the whole process go easier but pisses off certain specific cheating individuals, or letting chaos reign while avoiding getting yelled at by some percentage of customers flouting the rules. Social media has made things worse with sites dedicated to “How to game the system to get more than you paid for” and “How to take more than your share of what’s supposed to be shared resources (e.g. bin space) from your fellow passengers.” So far I see a lot more praise for “Carrier X let me get away with boarding an excess bag” than I do for posts like “Carrier X prevented me from boarding an excess bag so everyone else will have room for their one bag.” Carrier X has lots of employees watching social media and wants to do whatever garners the most praise from the customers. It’s really a race to the bottom going on. IMO/IME when jerks are less than WAG 2% they’re shunned and effectively suppressed by social pressure. Once they exceed WAG[sup]2[/sup] 10% they reach critical mass and it becomes maladaptive for anyone else to behave anything less than utterly jerkily themselves. > [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > Is the airplane door the real bottleneck? When boarding, there’s always a small wait to get your ticket scanned, a small wait to get through the airplane door, and then a long wait for everyone else to finally get their ass in a seat. I’m not sure if it would help much to get everyone on the plane in 2 minutes if there’s still gonna be 30 minutes of futzing around before we’re ready to push back. > > When getting off, one door is fine. The plane parks at the gate and opens the door, and if I’m at the back of the plane I know I’m not moving for 5-10 minutes while everyone in front of me wrestles their luggage out of the bins. Once I’m in the aisle and walking forward, it’s a straight shot to baggage claim or passenger pickup. It’s not the doorway as such that’s the bottleneck. It’s the length of the line ahead of you. This is particularly true for de-boarding. As you say, if you’re in the very back in row 30 you’re gonna be stuck there for 10 minutes since people only pull out their bags & offload at the rate of about 3 rows per minute. If instead of all 30 rows going out the front door the front 15 rows went out the front door and the back 15 rows simultaneously went out the back door everybody would be done in half the time. Since everyone would be at most 15 rows from a door, not 30. It’d still be just 3 rows per minute _per door_. The same effect could be had on twin-aisle widebodies if we also used the right front door for deboarding. As it is the single door is double width, but folks tend to still go through it single file or sorta 1-1/2 file rather than two abreast from the two aisle streams. Just like merging on the freeway, people slow down & goof around more than necessary rather than zippering the two lines neatly together. It’s apparently deep-seated human nature. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-airlines-boarding-groups-question/783984.md?page=1)