Boarding and Deboarding Strategies in a Narrow-Body Aircraft: A Comparative Simulation Study

Deboarding sits on the aircraft turnaround critical path, yet it is usually treated as boarding run in reverse, with schedules validated for boarding assumed to keep their merit when the flow direction changes. This study compares five conventional schedules in both directions under one cabin geometry, in a three-dimensional Airbus A320 economy-cabin simulation at three passenger loads with ten replications per scenario. The ordering is reversed, as the mirror intuition suggests: Back-to-Front is fastest to board at full load and slowest to deboard. Two results are less expected. First, schedule choice loses most of its leverage when the process reverses: the full-load spread is 26 s against 121 s on the boarding side, and a decisive boarding advantage collapses into a statistical tie in the deboarding direction. Second, what survives is not duration but its distribution. At full load, mean seat-to-door time is 40% longer under Back-to-Front than under Front-to-Back, and the last-served passenger waits 11.9 min against 9.0, differences that persist in proportion when compliance is only partial. Deboarding schedule choice is therefore a service-quality instrument rather than a turnaround-duration one, and schedules must be evaluated in the direction the cabin process actually runs.