Everyone has an assigned seat.

The plane isn’t leaving without you.

And yet… boarding always feels tense.

In this episode of Curious by Design, we unpack why airline boarding feels chaotic, stressful, and strangely competitive, even when, on paper, it shouldn’t be.

Airline boarding isn’t designed around comfort. It’s designed around constraints passengers rarely see: turnaround time, overhead bin interference, narrow gates, and predictable departure schedules. What looks like disorder is actually a system shaped by operations research, behavioral psychology, and monetized scarcity.

This episode explores why “efficient” boarding methods often fail in the real world, how overhead bins, not walking speed, create the true bottleneck, and why systems that are mathematically faster are often rejected because they feel unfair. We look at how standing creates the illusion of progress, how vague boarding groups reduce conflict, and how charging for checked bags turned early boarding into a competition for survival.

Airlines don’t optimize for happiness.

They optimize for reliability.

The result is a boarding process where position feels like value, waiting feels like risk, and movement feels like safety, even when it changes nothing.

The next time you find yourself standing up before your group is called, hovering near the lane, or guarding your place in line, remember: you’re not being irrational. You’re responding exactly as the system was designed for you to respond.

That’s Curious by Design.

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