airplane_boarding

Simulates the process of boarding a plane. Can I determine the fastest way to board a plane?

Running

Sitting in the Montreal airport (YUL) waiting to board my return flight on January 4th, 2023, I thought to myself, "Holy this is taking a long time!" It was. On a flight supposed to board at 5:40 PM, we didn't even begin boarding until 6:30 PM. The flight didn't take off until 7:15 PM. 45-minute boarding time felt a bit much. I wondered: "Was there a faster way to board a plane?" This thought brought me back to a CGP Grey YouTube video, "The Better Boarding Method Airlines Won't Use". I remarked to my dad, "I bet I could make a simulation out of this to find out which boarding method is the fastest!" And so, here I am.

Run with:

python ~/airplane_boarding/airplane_boarding.py window_width window_height

where * :

• window_width is the desired width of window (in pixels). This must be an integer value, though it is not necessary.
• window_height is the desired height of window (in pixels). This must be an integer value, though it is also not necessary.

* If no arguments are provided, the program will resort to the defaults that worked for my device.

Seat Layouts

Various characteristics of the simulated plane can be altered. This can be done by changing values in the seat_layouts table, defined in line 48. Here are some of those characteristics:

• The user can set the number of exits on the plane with n_exits. Users can choose for the plane to have 1, 2, or 3 exits. This value is defined on line 47.
• Remove/add a row from seat_layouts to remove/add that section from the plane. For instance, if the user doesn't want a first class, simply remove the row associated with first.
• Alter the values in the seat_layout column to change the seat layout. Place seats in alphabetical order; spaces denote walkways. The number of walkways must be equal for each section of the plane, or an n_walkways exception is thrown. There must be at least one walkway and at most two, and if this rule is violated, an n_walkways exception is also thrown.
• n_rows indicates the number of rows in each section. This value must be between 5 and 50 (inclusive).
• leg_room is the leg room for each section in terms of passenger diameters. For instance, a value of 1.5 is a leg room of one and a half times a passenger's diameter.
• seat_depth follows a similar concept to leg_room, but refers to the depth of a seat.

Some values provided to seat_layouts are too extreme for the program to handle, though airplane_boarding.py does its best to correct any errors. If any errors are found and corrected, the program notifies the user of this in the console.

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This is still a work in progress. I am currently coding various boarding methods. A struggle with this simulation is that with so many tkinter instances, the program can get really slow if I spawn too many passengers at once. Hopefully you enjoy what I have accomplished so far!