Aisle edge
An earlier passenger blocks a later one when the later passenger must pass their stopped row, or when their rows are too close for both to work.
A one-lane scheduling problem
The Order That Blocks the Aisle
A tidy queue can be a single long obstruction. Move one person, open a patch of empty aisle, and two pieces of work happen at once.
The stopwatch
What one experiment saw
This is the measured part. The authors used assigned seats in a mock narrow-body cabin on a soundstage. Each method got one run, so these times are evidence from that run, not universal airline constants.
| Method | Official clock | Extended clock | Official seconds |
|---|
Reading the source table and converting both clocks.
The obstruction
Move the second passenger
The first passenger walks toward the rear. The second is assigned to the adjacent row, so there is not enough working aisle for both bags. Drag the outlined passenger to the row two places forward, or use the buttons.
Queue at the door
First passengerRear window seat
rear
Event schedule, not an animation clock
Computing the blocking chain.
The further result
A stopwatch is not a mechanism
A single compliant soundstage run can be dismissed. So do not ask the model to reproduce its seconds. Ask which order creates the longest causal chain, then make that chain survive different cabins and imperfect queues.
The strong objection: one run in a mock cabin cannot tell an airline what will happen with its passengers, bins, groups, or boarding gate.
| Model order | Median | Middle simulation spread | Median longest chain |
|---|
Waiting for the first seeded comparison.
Seat edge
A window or middle passenger waits while already seated aisle-side neighbours stand and clear the half-row.
Critical path
The completion time is the heaviest chain through those dependencies. Everything off that chain can overlap without changing the finish.
The instrument has teeth
The check
What would make it fail
The independent clock conversion, published seconds, and deliberately damaged clock must disagree in exactly the expected places.
Uncertainty and free choices