There’s plenty of anecotal views on how to best board an airplane. A new paper showed up in the arXiv last week with experimental results (albeit with limited sample size) for different strategies. Randomized boarding beat back-to-front and the block-based method. Window-middle-aisle (“Wilma”) came in at about 30 seconds faster, but with a sample size of 1 it’s not necessarily statistically significant. The “Steffan” method of boarding, which boards passengers at every other row together, came in slightly faster.
There’s a video on Youtube of their method.