Didn't United try this on their short lived airline Ted? If I remember, it doesn't work very well, if only because many people travel together and take window and center and aisle, and they, quite reasonably, don't want to split up. In fact, you don't want to split up parents and children.

Then, you have the elite passenger problem, where frequent fliers, who can't always afford first class, board early to grab their seats and precious overhead baggage space, and they block the aisles.

All these ideas are clever, but they don't work very well.

The fastest demonstrated systems are those used by Southwest and railroads.

Southwest: No assigned seats. People self manage the boarding and seat assignment process as it happens. This was mentioned in passing in the Wired article. It still leads the alternatives by a large margin.

Amtrak Acela: No assigned seats, lots of doors, no need for seat belts, etc. This loads and unloads even faster. The equivalent of a full 727 loads in a few minutes at stations like NYC Penn. The limiting factor is clearing people through the ticket checking process, not getting them into seats.

TGV, Thalys: Assigned seats, lots of doors, no need for seat belts etc. This is slower than Amtrak, but does not delay the train schedule. They restrict access to the train platform so that they can check tickets in advance and send people to stand at the right place for the right door for their car on the train. Then two doors per car lets the train load as fast as Amtrak. You do spend more time standing around in the aisle on the train dealing with getting to the proper seat if the train is full. But the train can be moving.

The reality is that the major delay factor is the assigned seat. If you remove the assigned seat, the self managed seating is much faster than any of the assigned seat alternatives. As an extensive traveler I've found that I prefer faster through the system over assigned seating.

I've travelled quite a bit via Southwest, and I've never found its boarding process to have wasted my time. However, it seems to waste the time of the 85% of passengers who begin lining up in one of the three corrals about an hour before flight time. My favorite maneuver is to arrive at the gate 15 minutes before flight time and enter through the "A" corral just as it is emptying, while all the schmoes in "B" and "C" who have been there an hour stand there. Of course it is a _bit_ inconvenient to be online with printer access exactly 24 hours before flight time to get an "A" ticket, but the bargain turns out to be worth it.

The word I use is "corral" because the preflight behavior of Southwest passengers is best described as bovine. "They treat us like cattle, so we act like cattle": nervous, suspicious, obtuse, exposed, perched on a psychological precipe between stolidity and mania, and obsessed with one's relation to the group and to the boundary. Efficiency and my own coping mechanisms aside, I'd rather travel on an airline without such dehumanizing operating procedures.

One such airline is JetBlue, which not only puts the best (i.e. most legroom) seats in the back, but in its Long Beach hub actually loads from both ends of the plane. It's worth the inconvenient drive down to Long Beach to travel the remainder of the journey with such civility. Civility requires assigned seats, it seems to me.

I think much of the problem with airplane loading, which doesn't obtain in train loading, is that the front seats are perceived as being so much "better" than the back. As JetBlue's example shows, airlines could do something about this. On the other hand, there's probably nothing to be done about the suckage of the middle seat.