Recently a couple of airlines experimented with the following airplane boarding policy

"Passengers with no overhead bin luggage board before those who do have such luggage"

We will show that the this and related policies attempt to construct thin focal lenses in certain space-time domains.

We will provide a mathematical construction for a thin focal lens in the canonical case of an interval in Minkowski space time and approximate constructions in other cases. Unfortunately, the shape used by the airlines is neither thin nor focal.

The talk will be self-contained, experience with boarding airplanes is a plus so please practice.

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