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    There have been studies and there are more efficient ways (not necessarily row-by-row, this sounds too complicated to enforce in practice). But there are also other considerations, inertia and it's very difficult not to have people clumping up near a counter everywhere there is a bottleneck.
    – Relaxed
    Commented Aug 31, 2016 at 19:47
  • 9
    In my experience the group numbers are very closely dependent on where you sit, the idea being to get the people into the plane roughly from back to front, as @pnuts notes. The problem comes with the fact that there are only a few groups, so the groups are large, so you still get people being held up by those stowing their luggage, and also that while they prevent people who are in the front from boarding early, they don't prevent people who are in the back from boarding late. Someone with a group 2 pass can board after group 5 is called.
    – phoog
    Commented Aug 31, 2016 at 19:53
  • 9
    One of the expectations of StackExchange is that you have attempted some initial research on your own. There are numerous articles and studies about aircraft boarding order, and airlines are constantly tweaking the way they organize their groups. See e.g. Bloomberg, Wired, CNT.
    – choster
    Commented Aug 31, 2016 at 20:03
  • 1
    In my experience, especially on routes catering to business travelers during peak business travel times (say, Friday afternoon US transcon flights), first class + platinum + gold + silver frequent fliers (and sometimes credit card holders get lumped into group 2 or so) can be 75+% of the passengers.
    – Zach Lipton
    Commented Aug 31, 2016 at 20:36
  • 5
    Do note that passenger boarding is not necessarily the limiting step in turning the plane around. For example, if checked luggage is loading at the same time as passenger boarding, then there is no benefit in reducing passenger boarding time any further than luggage loading time. The important thing is to minimise the probability that passenger boarding takes excessively long rather than to minimise a typical boarding time that's already been slotted into the choreography of turning the plane around. If they're sticking to a method it may well be because it's "good enough".
    – Steve Jessop
    Commented Sep 1, 2016 at 9:27