Why do passenger planes always board from the left side

Q. What’s the first possible reason

A. That the practice predates human flight. Most early pilots were also trained horsemen and as such were used to getting on a horse from the left side.

Q. Why do riders always mount a horse from the left

A. Because as part of their ensemble they would also be sporting a sword, worn on their left side. Try mounting anything from its right side with a sword strapped to the left side of you…..it’s not very easy.

Q. Why does where the pilot gets on horses have anything to do with passenger planes boarding side

A. Because of the development of the earliest single seated planes to the modern jumbo jet.

Pilots in modern planes sit on the left while the co-pilot sits on the right of the cockpit. One possible explanation for this is that, because of the way the engine was fixed to early planes it made it much easier to turn a grounded plane to the left, rather than the right, because of the directional force created by the rotating engine. As a result, on early airfields any ground manoeuvres tended to involve only turning to the left.

And when planes got big enough for the pilot and co-pilot to sit next to each other the pilot would sit on the left, so that he could see better when making all those left hand turns. It follows then that when passengers started getting on planes the pilot would taxi to the left hand side of the terminal building for them to do so, which is the second possible explanation to the original question.

Q. And the third possible reason why we always board planes from the left

A. As with the mounting horseman and the left turn only explanation, this last possible reason suggests why pilots always sit on the left hand side of the cockpit.

In the first side-by-side planes a single joystick would be in the middle of the two seats. Since most people are right handed it would make sense for the pilot to be seated on the left hand side of the cockpit. And for practical reasons when passengers started boarding planes they did so on the left.

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by Lisa Cardy