I don’t think I know anybody who enjoys flying.  Young kids sometimes find it exciting, and George Clooney’s character in Up In The Air certainly had it down to a science.  But beyond that, I can’t think of anyone.  Given the lack of any other practical option, we’ll put up with it and are even grateful that we have technology which enables us to visit family and friends.  But the flying itself, even when nothing goes wrong, is a positively unenjoyable experience.  There are some obvious reasons, like the expense, the crowds, the confined spaces, the long lines, the strip downs, the pat downs, the uncomfortable seats, the lost luggage, the rush to get to the airport on time, and airplane bathrooms that are smaller than my refrigerator.  But I wondered if there was a more fundamental underlying cause that could explain our displeasure.

Some have suggested that fundamentally it’s the lack of control that is the common thread in all our complaints.  Indeed most aspects of air travel are out of our control, and when we can’t control our environment, it adds some stress.  That makes sense.  But today, I had five hours seated in a cramped uncomfortable seat to think about this further.  A lack of control implies that any attempts on my part to improve my own situation are futile and have no impact.  Yes, this is annoying (especially to control freaks like myself), but it’s manageable.  After all, there are plenty of situations in life where I have no control.  So what would be even worse?  What if our attempts to improve our own situation actually had the opposite effect?  What if … instead of being rewarded for doing a good deed, I was punished instead?  Now wouldn’t that be stressful?  Unfortunately that’s how air travel has been designed and implemented.  There are a few examples of this, but the big offender is the way luggage is treated.  When it comes to luggage, the system gives me every incentive to do the very thing that makes my experience worse.

Photo By sun dazed

Imagine a world with no carry-on luggage.  I dream of this world.  Just think …

• Security lines would go so much faster.
• You wouldn’t have to lug your baggage around with you all over the airport while you get food, use the bathroom, and wait for boarding to begin.
• Boarding the plane would be as easy and friction-free as boarding a bus.  The boarding process would be a lot faster, almost as fast as the deboarding process.  (Fully boarding a 737 takes about 25 minutes, while fully deboarding takes 5-10 minutes.)
• You wouldn’t get knocked in the head as your neighbor unloads their 30 pound suitcase from the overhead bin.
• There wouldn’t be any contention for overhead bin space.  This has the added benefit that people wouldn’t be as determined to be the first to board the plane.  This would reduce congestion near the gate doorway as people anxiously await their zone number to be called.  (But that’s a whole other blog post.)
• All the legroom under the seat in front of you could be used for  ….. well, your legs.

Not only would all of this save travelers time and reduce stress, but it would save the airlines and airports money.  But instead of this paradise, airlines have created the opposite world.  Every step of the way, travelers are encouraged and incentivized to bring more carry-on luggage instead of less.  Here are some of the many ways:

• The number one incentive is that I don’t have to pay for my carry-on luggage.  Checked bags cost $25 per bag, and my one carry-on costs me nothing.  Therefore I should try and fit as much stuff into my carry-on as possible.
• Larger carry-ons can be placed in the overhead bin, while smaller carry-ons must be placed under the seat in front of you.  Therefore, passengers who bring larger carry-ons (i.e., suitcases) actually get more legroom.  On my flight today, I tried to do “the smart thing” by checking all my bags (and paying the baggage fees).  My only carry-on was my laptop bag.  When trying to put my laptop in the overhead bin (I wasn’t actually planning to use it on the flight), the attendant told me that my laptop was small and needed to go under the seat in front of me, and that the overheads were reserved for larger pieces.  So basically, I was penalized for bringing less carry-on luggage.
• If I have only carry-on luggage, then it saves me time on both ends of my flight.  I don’t have to wait 10 minutes to check my bags in the first place, and I don’t have to wait 20 minutes to get them back at my destination.
• Checked baggage is handled with zero care.  Bags are thrown, dropped, kicked, stacked, and rolled.  No passenger would dare check any sensitive camera or electronic equipment because it is virtually guaranteed not to arrive in one piece.  Yet another incentive to carry it on.
• And then there’s the risk of lost luggage when you check it.  The truth is that checked luggage actually gets lost very rarely.  Still, because there is a non-zero chance that this will happen, people tend to want to eliminate the risk entirely by bringing all their luggage on board with them.

So, every incentive from the airline is to make my carry-on bag as big as regulations will allow and stuff as much into it as I possibly can.  But when all passengers do exactly this, it creates a worse experience for everyone.

What if the airlines gave passengers incentives to bring less carry-on luggage?  They could …

• … make checked luggage free again, like it used to be.  They could more than compensate for the lost revenue by increasing the price of every ticket by $15.
• … charge a fee for bringing more than 10 pounds of carry-on luggage onto the plane.  Or, divide each overhead bin into smaller compartments so that there is a fixed (but small) amount of assigned storage space per seat.  No more contention, and no more incentive to be the first one to board the plane.
• … create a system such that I can tag my checked bags myself at home.  If I can print my own boarding pass, I ought to be able to tag my own bags.  As I enter the airport, I can just place them on the conveyor belt myself and head straight to security.  This incentivizes me to check my bags rather than carry them on.
• ... design a better system for unloading checked luggage off the plane and getting them into the hands of passengers quickly.  This is admittedly a hard engineering problem.  But for Pete’s sake, we landed an unmanned vehicle on Mars and drove it around from Earth.  There are plenty of ideas out there.  Instead of loading and unloading one bag at a time onto the plane, what about putting the luggage onto carts, and loading the entire cart onto the plane?  Then, upon landing, the cart could just be wheeled off the plane, hooked to the train, and whisked off to baggage claim faster than the passengers could get there.  Passengers could pull their bags directly off the carts, rather than having a complicated and expensive system of conveyor belts and carousels.

Just a crazy idea.

--Rajeev