All We Like Sheep

Southwest Airlines takes a lot of flack for being the Greyhound of the skies: the pack in a lot of people with no frills. In its favor, Southwest has always had good fares compared to its competition, it has a lot of flights since they are almost all relatively short-haul, and, in this era of rapidly disappearing onboard services, Southwest’s relatively austere cabin service no longer is out of step with the industry. In fact, with complementary drinks and peanuts (two packs!), Southwest is now ahead of some of its rivals.

[Okay, that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in. Moving on…]

Southwest has recently overhauled many of their procedures, the most visible of which is the boarding process. Southwest has never assigned seats, favoring instead open seating, which had the downside of adding to its cattle-car reputation. Back in the day, they used to hand out California-shaped plastic, numbered boarding passes that you had to acquire at the gate, then surrender on the way to the airplane. They eventually did away with that in favor of three boarding groups, one of which would be designated on the boarding pass that the passenger would acquire from the ticket agent or (glory be!) his or her own printer. The problem with that system is that people would begin to line up at the A, B or C posts long before the scheduled departure time, often before the aircraft had even arrived. In my experience, as a person who, like most, does not like to sit in the middle seat, this would lead to some discord in the boarding area. People would keep an eye out over their reading materials to see if other passengers were starting to line up in significant numbers. It never failed that at a certain point, like solids precipitating out of a solution, a stampede to fill out the line would take place, forcing everyone out of their seats and into a line, only to stand there for the next half hour. (That’s a psychology experiment about crowd behavior waiting to happen.)

This past month, Southwest modified its procedure to subdivide the A, B and C boarding groups into groups of 5. Each boarding pass now has a letter and a number, and at the appropriate time (not before!), the passenger goes to the set of stainless steel posts in the gate area that display the number sets; a television monitor or rotating sign displays the letter at the front of the line. There are six posts; five passengers are to stand between each set, up to 30. Numbers 31 to 60 stand on the other side of the posts. The gate agent calls A 1-30; after they board, A 31-60 board while the people with boarding passes B 1-30 line up in the space the first A group just vacated (the TV or sign switches from A to B), and so on. The procedure takes up much less room and, more importantly, relieves everyone from competing with their fellow passengers for space in line.

Sadly, this appears to be far too confusing for some of the fine folks who live among us. I have made several trips under the new regime, and each one has featured several people wandering among the properly assembled boarders holding their boarding pass in front of them like a lost tourist with a dimestore map. These poor souls then complain to those of us who will listen (who had no trouble matching the number on our boarding pass to the number on the big, shiny posts arrayed in the middle of the boarding area) that this process just doesn’t make sense, it’s too confusing, etc.

I confess that it makes me sad that people can be so easily befuddled, especially when the actual result of the new scheme, if they could manage to think about it clearly, makes their lives better. These lost people did not have to stand in line for 45 minutes (where they surely griped about having to get in line anyway); even better, the entire boarding process takes only about three minutes from the order to assemble to the procession down the jetway.

Change simply for the sake of change can be a step backward. Sometimes, though, it is for the better. The refusal of some people to recognize this, and their apparent joy in complaining about “the new,” is baffling to me. Less time spent standing in line, more time for relaxing, eating, buying trinkets (whatever you do in an airport to pass the time)? Bring it on. If you can’t handle it, trade in your A pass for a C pass, take your seat crammed between two people who knew what they were doing, and eat your peanuts in shame.