Enlarge / Through the pandemic, a number of airways have switched boarding procedures to create extra distance between passengers. (credit score: Nicholas Economou | NurPhoto | Getty Photos)

Jason Steffen research planets in different photo voltaic methods. His most well-known work—OK, second-most well-known work—was with NASA’s Kepler Mission, a survey of planetary methods. However you’re extra prone to have heard of Steffen, a professor on the College of Nevada at Las Vegas, in a really completely different context: as a pupil of the airplane boarding course of. Years in the past, after ready in one more line on a jam-packed jetway, the physicist thought to himself, “There needs to be a greater method than this.”

Airways are invested in boarding occasions—and to a lesser extent, offboarding—as a result of time equals cash. Flying individuals world wide is a low-margin enterprise, and the quicker you will get a flight loaded, into the air, after which emptied on the bottom, the quicker you will get the following spherical of paying prospects into the air.