You’ve probably never thought twice about the side of the plane you board, but there’s a real explanation for that.
Dougie Sharpe, the self-proclaimed “fact guy” on TikTok, shared the historical reason why we board airplanes on the left side.
“The reason we always load and unload airplanes from the left side of the plane is a holdover from when mankind moved by boat,” he explained in the video.
Sharpe said that since ancient times, the left side of boats was the cargo side and passengers would load and unload from.
“This made things logistically simple and would allow ships to travel around the world from port to port and always have the right equipment on the right side no matter where they were going,” he explained.
This allowed for consistency and ease with the construction of the ports because everyone agreed that the left side was used for loading and unloading.
It explains why the left side of the boat is called “port side” and the right side is called “starboard”.
“As mankind changed from boats to airplanes, engineers simply kept the concept and designed every airport and airplane so that passengers always load and unload the plane from the left side,” he concluded.
One person commented agreeing, “all true, I might also add, the term starboard comes from the fact that they used to have a starboard on the starboard side of the ship.”
“These are my favorite kinds of facts; practices that have lasted thousands of years,” said another.
The managing editor of “The Aviation Historian” Michael Oakley has explained this before.
“It’s one of the many aviation practices that goes beyond aviation itself into ship traditions,” Oakley told AFAR Media in January.
“Much of the terminology of aviation had its origins in nautical lore (rudder, cockpit, cockpit, bulkhead, joints, etc.), and similarly, aeronautical ways of doing things owe much to navigation. Just as ships and ships have a port side — the side of the ship usually adjacent to the dock when in port — planes are the same. Reasonably, people decided to keep boarding on the port (or left) side,” he said he.
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Image Source : nypost.com