Flying is one of those strange times where you just have to go with the flow and do as everyone else does. So you put your liquids in a small separate bag, make an impromptu whiskey purchase at 5 a.m. and always board your plane on the left hand side. Hang on, you’re right, you do always board your flight on the left-hand side. Have you ever stopped to wonder why that might be?
Well, dear reader, I’m here to tell you exactly why that might be. And, like most things in life, it all goes back to good old fashioned tradition.
I’ll be honest, I’d never really clocked that we always board planes on the left until I was sitting in a suitably hipster craft brewery with a buddy last week. They pointed out that they’d only ever boarded planes on the left-hand side, to a raft of “oh yeah, I never thought of thats” from our assembled group. It turns out we were far from the first people to ask this question, as social media popped off with the very topic recently.
According to several users, the tradition of boarding planes on the left hand side stems back to our days cruising the globe on ships and ocean liners. As British outlet UniLad explained:
You’re probably already familiar with the terminology of port and starboard on a ship, right?
Starboard refers to the right side of a ship looking to the front of the vessel, while port is the left side.
The word ‘starboard’ actually comes from Anglo-Saxon, which often smashed words together to describe something.
With ‘starboard’ this is actually a combination of the Old English word stéor (steer) and bord (side of the boat) because the steering oar was placed on the right hand side of the ship.
That meant it was easier for the left side, the ‘port’ side, to be the side where a vessel would dock, and where any passengers would disembark and cargo be unloaded.
It’s for this very reason that the left side of a ship became known as the ‘port’ side, as it was the side that touched the port. The name stuck in the shipping industry for generations, so when it came time to move onto ships of the skies, the terminology stayed very much the same.
This meant that the port side of an aircraft remained the side that touched port. But in this case, port is no longer a rickety wooden jetty and is instead a swanky airport bridge or a set of stairs on wheels. And because we’d always boarded ships on the port side, we just carried on boarding planes from the port side too.
So, there you have it. We board planes on the left, because the left side of a ship was where it was easiest to get on and off. The More You Know.