I have noticed, in recent flights, that before boarding there is usually an announcement that there is going to be too much luggage for the overhead bins and the airline is therefor offering to check your bag through to your destination for free.
I heard of a trick to lessen the risks of luggage pilfering. Buy a starter pistol. They are cheap and small, have a solid barrel, but qualifiy as a firearm for TSA purposes. TSA policy then, probably still now, is that checked luggage with firearms must be locked with a lock that TSA does NOT have a key to; they either want to reassure the public of no tampering, or don't trust their own employees.
So bring the starter pistol in your luggage, go through the firearm process, and you have luggage which TSA cares about and is less likely to be robbed or stolen.
No idea if this is still valid. No idea what extra delays and hassles are involved.
Strikes me as unlikely, since the TSA still needs to get into luggage that they suspect of having a bomb in, even if it had a starter pistol in it too.
I don't think they'd let a little thing like a lock get in their way. Even TSA bureaucrats can calculate the odds of an airline employee breaking in to unlocked luggage are higher than someone smuggling a bomb past the TSA inspectors who check the weapon and luggage before watching it be locked up.
Regarding plane boarding, I agree that a better system is possible, but it would likely require expensive redesigns of the terminal to have a numbered standing area for people to line up. Also, it would interfere with the "pay to board earlier" model that most airlines use.
A much more blatant example of inefficiency is *de*boarding. Normally planes deboard from the front to the back, with 30+ people in line waiting on a single person up ahead to grab their stuff. The process would complete ~10 times faster if, every time two people are both trying to leave, the person sitting in a seat yields to someone waiting in the aisle behind them.
>> A much more blatant example of inefficiency is *de*boarding. Normally planes deboard from the front to the back, with 30+ people in line waiting on a single person up ahead to grab their stuff. The process would complete ~10 times faster if, every time two people are both trying to leave, the person sitting in a seat yields to someone waiting in the aisle behind them.
In practice I don't think you could de-board 10x faster, or anywhere close. Any short delays in one part are smoothed out further up the plane. If there's a hold-up in row 90, then that just means rows 89 and under deboard faster, etc. I imagine you will almost always have full flow through the slowest part (eg: the door), at least until you get down to the last handful of people (at which point people probably are much more likely to give way if they are causing a blockage.)
That is not correct, consider what the bottleneck is. The bottleneck is people doing things that block the aisle while not moving forward; taking things out of the overhead bins, or looking back towards their seat to grab items. Under the current method, only one person can be doing that at a time. Under my method, dozens can.
I don't think it works like this in practice. Every bottleneck just opens up space for someone else to move faster ahead of the bottleneck. Unless you're standing, blocked, in like row 50, and rows 1-49 have completely de-boarded, and there's a clear aisle all the way to the exit, then being blocked for 20 seconds is not actually slowing anything down.
In practice, if you're blocked for 20 seconds in row 50, that just means some extra space opens up in the aisle for row 49, so row 49 de-boards faster. If they're all gone, then it opens up more space for row 48, etc.
Every minute you're standing there blocked means you're not blocking the aisle for someone ahead, who ends up de-boarding faster.
Edit: I've just seen the bit right at the end of your link, which suggests that the worst possible method is going strictly front to back, which I agree is bad. I've just not seen this in practice (maybe this is a US thing?) But yes, I agree that if you're the forward-most person left on the plane, then causing a blockage is bad and you shouldn't do it. However if there's blockages ahead of you and slow moving traffic, then causing a blockage in row 50 has no impact, as far as I can tell.
The fundamental factual issue is whether passengers are going out of the plane as fast as possible — i.e. whether the door is the binding constraint. If so, Ben is correct.
One test is whether there are times when nobody is going out because the front end of the line is empty. I don't think I have seen that.
As someone who flies quite a bit in Japan and a certain amount between Japan and other places, your comments are interesting.
JAL domestic, which is what I fly most, allows IIRC one free checked bag and there are no TSA thieves. They do X-ray that bag to look for suspicious things though. Although I usually fly with just carry on, I have never lost a checked bag with JAL. In fact they are sufficiently proud of their goal of zero lost bags that, coincidentally, they were on Japanese TV last night showing the almost total automation of the baggage system in Haneda.
JAL used to board from back to front but about a year ago they started boarding window, middle, aisle. I'm not sure it made a lot of difference because boarding in Japan tends to be very fast anyway - typically a 90%+ loaded 737 boards in about 15 minutes and it is not uncommon for boarding to be complete and the jetway disconnected a few minutes before scheduled departure time. That's probably because not many people have masses of carry on (see free checked bag above) - people like me with a roll bag and a laptop bag are rare and because we are fairly rare it is extremely rare that there is not enough space on the overhead baggage area for whatever people want to stow there.
A couple of other notes. On JAL or other domestic Japanese airlines you can usually board without showing anyone your "government issued picture ID" or indeed any ID. You have checked in using the app, you show the app to get through security and again as you board and that's it - or you can use the JAL credit card for JAL flights the same way. Only when you leave Japan do you have to do something like show a passport. Also JAL domestic flights allow you to have glass bottles of booze in your carry on, which last time I was in the US or Europe was definitely a no no. I take advantage of that to not check in my bag on my returns from international flights where I've purchased booze that is either unavailable or very expensive in rural Japan
There was a WSJ article a few years ago on loading order - it found that airlines had tested multiple methods and none mattered b/c the boarding time was determined by the random presence of people trying to stuff stuff into overhead bins that didn't easily fit, getting things out of stuff going into overhead bins in the aisle instead of before boarding, etc. Those holdups dominated any gains from particular seating order. So they mostly board by your status, making higher status people (me!) not have to wait as long. I'm ok with that. :>
One of the reasons airlines check carry-ons at the gate is that too many carry-ons slow the boarding process, as people fiddle with them and search for a spot. Why the airlines don't just do "carry-on size bags travel as checked luggage free" is beyond me.
From the passenger's viewpoint, there's another reason to bring the bag to the gate - on flights in small aircraft the airline will offer to "gate check" the bag since the small airplanes don't have room. Those bags you keep until boarding, and get back immediately when getting off the plane. You just grab it yourself off the luggage cart - no waiting for the baggage carousel.
That doesn't make much sense to me since the boarding method David described should significantly reduce the time it takes people to find a place for their bags in the overhead bin, because many people can then do it in parallel. Should speed things up by maybe 3-5X i would think. If that's not the case, it's not clear why
My observation (in the EU at least) is that the time taken to load everyone's luggage on board the plane (and fuel, etc) is much greater than the time taken to load on all the people, so there is no saving to the airline in getting people to board more efficiently. Any time I've taken a flight, we have all boarded (slowly) and then sat around waiting anyway.
Also, I would much rather queue for slightly longer with my family (who will be sitting next to me), than be forced to separate from them in order to queue more efficiently alongside the person sitting directly in front of and behind me.
These two things combined mean that whilst there will be a lot of individuals wasting time on an inefficient queueing system, changing the system to suit them doesn't suit everyone, and doesn't end up benefiting the airline.
From the airline's perspective, as long as everyone is boarded by the time they need to leave, there is no cost to them for slow boarding. And I suspect that (especially when you account for people like me, who travel with family), forcing people to queue separately from the people they are sitting next to is not something that people are, on average, willing to pay much more for.
One could avoid that problem by letting people sitting next to each other who are traveling together board together, treat two or three people as a single unit in my system.
Those of us who try to pack lightly so as not to over-fill the overhead compartment are punished for it too. Recently I was on a smaller commuter flight for the first leg of my trip and the announcement before we boarded told those of us with smaller carry-ons to put them under the seats in front of us so that the larger bags will fit up above. I didn't notice the agent at the gate even checking the size of the carry-ons, and some of them were quite large. I had purposely used a small backpack along with my purse, so that I wouldn't take up too much space, but with both of those bags under the seat in front of mine, I would have no space for my feet. Then, when I realized there actually was space for my bag, as the flight attendant was closing the compartments, I asked to put my bag up there, and she scolded me for delaying the flight. Grr.
I use my carry-on for everything of value that I don't want broken or stolen or lost by the TSA agents (as has happened to friends of mine), so I will always check a bag with my normal usual items, but bring a carry-on with valuables and medicines that I want to keep an eye on.
I also include one set of clothes in my carry-on just in case the checked luggage doesn't make it—if necessary I can hand wash one set, wear the other. I'm not sure if that precaution is still necessary or not.
Good point. Actually last fall, my suitcase was delayed by a day when I went to the Netherlands. I should have done that, because I ended up having to borrow clothes from my daughters.
Sample size of two but I just recently had a bag fail to arrive on a flight from Norway to DC via Iceland. Thankfully it was the return leg so it was pretty straightforward to have the airline mail the bag to my house, but it would have been a much bigger problem on the way out.
might pay for the airline to accept checked bags that fit the carry-on size limit for free leaves off substantially all of the analysis from the airline’s perspective, of why it may not be a good idea. Some considerations that an airline may have include:
-- Many airlines structure their fees to achieve material revenue from checked bags;
-- Allowing passengers to check a carry-on size bag for free then leads to two scenarios that are more expensive for the airline (1) passengers get to take a second carry-on bag on the plane without paying additional fees, or (2) the gate agents are now charged with verifying passengers, who have checked a carry-on size bag for free, do not carry one onto the plane—making the process of checking boarding passes and allowing passengers to board the plane much more difficult.
-- The tagging, tracking, handling, and transport required for checked bags costs the airlines far more than it costs to allow passengers to bring bags on a flight.
TSA
I believe the TSA does care whether an agent steals or vandalizes a passenger’s luggage. Whether they have procedures in place to sufficiently disincentivize this is less obvious. We, or at least I, don’t know the extent to which TSA checked-bag searches are recorded on camera, and whether there is a record of which bags were searched and when, so that it may be determined which agent searched a passenger’s bag even without having a slip of paper put into the searched bag.
Loading Planes
There are many ways in which boarding and deboarding planes could be sped up. My observation is that a window / middle / aisle boarding order would make much less of an impact than no-overhead-carry-on / overhead-carry-on order, with the overhead carry-on boarding, as you suggest, from the back to the front. However, then the complexities of group travel (more than one traveler) come into play--whether it is families with kids, people who may need a little help, or simply travelers who want to board together—and their reaction to being separated may not be positive. This boarding system may be theoretically more efficient but may cause an undue amount of passenger unhappiness.
On The Ground
Given that you waited half an hour for an Uber to never show, and it was more expensive than a traditional cab, that would suggest that this was a surge period with fewer Uber drivers available. If Uber was at all times more expensive than a cab, wouldn’t the market eventually correct for this—people would stop taking Uber from Reagan National until Uber’s prices were more competitive?
The Cost Of The Passport System
A common way to look at the cost of wasting an individual’s time is to assign a value that is, in some way, derived from the potential economic output of that individual, assuming they were not waiting, in this case in a passport line, that they would be generating economic output. This is often an incorrect perspective. They may have been simply getting to a hotel earlier and playing a computer/smartphone game, which they can also do while waiting in line. Or they may be getting business or personal work done on their smartphone. If you have invited someone over to watch a movie at your home and they show up an hour late, is the cost to you an hour of your economic output? Probably not because you are still getting things done before they arrive. Smartphones and other portable devices have enabled people to get things done, whether they be business-related or personal or playing computer games, while out and about. While there may be a cost to waiting in a passport line, it is likely to be appreciably less than an equivalent amount of that person’s productive time, and is probably more related to lost opportunity cost.
So far as your revenue point, the change would make flying on average less expensive so airlines could at the same time raise fares a little without losing customers.
"The tagging, tracking, handling, and transport required for checked bags costs the airlines far more than it costs to allow passengers to bring bags on a flight."
Can you point me at your source for that data?
Note that they are bearing those costs at present for the excess bags that they check for free, although not for the ones they fit on.
My view of the cost of waiting in line is based mostly on my experience, and I don't generally find that I can get anything done then. You may be correct that many others do. On the other hand, they are doing it under less comfortable circumstances than they usually work in.
I don't have a specific source that indicates it costs more for an airline to handle a passenger's baggage than for the passenger to handle it. But it does seem intuitive that if I carry my bag and stow it in an overhead compartment, then, upon deplaning, remove it from the overhead compartment and carry it off myself, it will cost less than if I give my bag to an airline staff member who then issues me a receipt tag, tags the bag, then carries the bag to a cart which is driven to the plane and loaded into the cargo hold. Then, upon arrival, the bag is then removed from the cargo hold and put onto a cart which is driven to a baggage claim area, unloaded and put onto a baggage claim carousel, with the bag being scanned several times in this process.
More evidence of the cost is that airlines typically charge $25 to $75 per checked bag and, whether this is tied to their out-of-pocket costs plus a profit margin, or is based on a value-pricing model, airlines would reasonably perceive a loss of some percentage of this amount if the bag were checked in with no charge.
Southwest does not charge for the first two bags, so the evidence on how significant the cost is is ambiguous. I'm sure it costs something, but the hassle of passengers dealing with bags as overhead luggage costs something too — it makes the boarding (and unboarding) process slower and less pleasant. That imposes some costs directly on the airline, some indirectly by lowering the quality of the service they are selling hence the price they can sell it for.
"Southwest does not charge for the first two bags, so the evidence on how significant the cost is is ambiguous."
This is not a logically correct statement. Just because one company does not have an explicit charge for something does not demonstrate the ambiguity of the significance of the cost of that thing. For example, Amazon.com does not charge for return shipping for most products, yet it is not ambiguous that the cost is significant.
If I am understanding correctly, I think your argument is, in essence, that airlines should consider shifting to a more checked-bag inclusive pricing methodology because you feel the additional costs to the airlines would be more than offset by the additional revenues they would generate.
The evidence that the costs are substantial is that some airlines charge for checked luggage. The evidence that they are not substantial is that an airline doesn't charge. So the evidence is ambiguous. That doesn't mean that one claim or the other couldn't be established with other evidence.
Some airlines have invested in tail stands to offset this, but I understand they're simply not widely adopted. One more thing to add and remove, I suppose.
Not much of a problem if you board all window passengers then all middle seat passengers then all aisle passengers. In the worst case you get only a third of the imbalance.
TSA, Visa system and Passport controls etc. are classic examples of activity without productivity.
Visa issuance can very easily be outsourced. Let different companies be in charge of issuing Visa to foreigners. Only worry about those who overstay or otherwise break the terms of the visa and fine the companies accordingly. As long as there is enough competition we will see these companies come up with creative ways to not just reduce visa offenses but increase the number of travelers into USA.
You left out one additional reason for carrying on a bag instead of checking it: because its contents are things you don't want anyone else handling except yourself. This is not fear of vandalism; it's just knowledge of how airport baggage handlers typically handle luggage (which anyone can see by looking out the window of the airplane and watching them do it). When I travel by air, I have two bags: one has my laptop in it (actually there are usually two, my work laptop and my personal laptop); the other has my CPAP machine. I'm not letting anyone else handle either of those bags. No airline employee has yet asked me why I don't check the bags (even the two bags combined are within the size requirement for carry-ons), but if they did, the above would be my response.
I often wonder why they don't load planes like you described. I suspect it has to do with selling earlier access to boarding the plane. Perhaps enough people have missed a flight in their lives that they have significant stress reduced after boarding.
The real question is how they know that there’s too much luggage for the overhead bins, before people start stuffing things in there. I’ve heard them come up with a random “target” for the number of people who need to check their carry-on bag, as if it’s a science.
Our rule is if we're going to travel a lot on trains at our destination, we try hard to have carry-ons only, as dealing with significant amounts of luggage in crowded and enormous train stations - especially in places like India or Japan (in Japan, train station transfer walks can go for miles) - is an enormous pain. We use the military "roll method" for stowing clothes, which is far more efficient than folding clothes, but it does mean that we end up with quite heavy luggage...
It also means our luggage won't be out of our sight, which is a good thing...
Except for those actually needing time to get seated, most airlines seat preferred customers first to keep their custom. Just good marketing.
Stuff disappears from luggage regardless of whether you go through TSA or check it. If you don’t want to monitor it closely in hand, ship it separately. Surely any libertarian recognizes that a government which is actively monitoring possessions and controlling population movement likely has reasons other than the asserted need for safety. The price of all that paperwork, surveillance gear, workers (tsa, customs, immigration agents at airports) defies any notion that economy is an issue. The problems Tulsi Gabbard suffered flying after she bucked her party is clear evidence of the nefarious intent of all this expensive “safely.” There are way cheaper ways to be safe, but they do not train people in compliance.
If I go through TSA for carry-on it is a lot harder for someone to steal stuff than if I check it. Normally they X-ray luggage, only open it to search with you watching.
Bingo on just ship it. I've been doing that since 9/11 and saves all sort of hassle, picked the tip up from work where likewise we just drop ship everything before we arrive. Hotels accept shipments just fine as will your friends and family you are visiting
Also less chance customs stealing your data or having to answer all sorts of questions you don't want to bother with. Nowadays I just travel with a passport, two credit cards, some cash, and a burner phone, way less hassle.
Lufthansa group (except for Eurowings) do the boarding similar to the way you describe. Or more precisely, group 1 and 2 are priority (business class etc) and the group 3 is window seats, 4 middle and group 5 aisle. But nothing about row numbers, probably would be to complicated
What I mean is that at some point granularity becomes too high to be efficient. People come late are confused about how the system works, try to game the system and go earlier etc.
Also different airlines has different intentions with boarding groups, in Europe some airlines have the last boarding group for people with tariff that does not include bigger trolley carry-on baggage for example.
Status passengers are another complication as they can board any time and can sit anywhere
I heard of a trick to lessen the risks of luggage pilfering. Buy a starter pistol. They are cheap and small, have a solid barrel, but qualifiy as a firearm for TSA purposes. TSA policy then, probably still now, is that checked luggage with firearms must be locked with a lock that TSA does NOT have a key to; they either want to reassure the public of no tampering, or don't trust their own employees.
So bring the starter pistol in your luggage, go through the firearm process, and you have luggage which TSA cares about and is less likely to be robbed or stolen.
No idea if this is still valid. No idea what extra delays and hassles are involved.
Strikes me as unlikely, since the TSA still needs to get into luggage that they suspect of having a bomb in, even if it had a starter pistol in it too.
I don't think they'd let a little thing like a lock get in their way. Even TSA bureaucrats can calculate the odds of an airline employee breaking in to unlocked luggage are higher than someone smuggling a bomb past the TSA inspectors who check the weapon and luggage before watching it be locked up.
Regarding plane boarding, I agree that a better system is possible, but it would likely require expensive redesigns of the terminal to have a numbered standing area for people to line up. Also, it would interfere with the "pay to board earlier" model that most airlines use.
A much more blatant example of inefficiency is *de*boarding. Normally planes deboard from the front to the back, with 30+ people in line waiting on a single person up ahead to grab their stuff. The process would complete ~10 times faster if, every time two people are both trying to leave, the person sitting in a seat yields to someone waiting in the aisle behind them.
Southwest does line up people, although it is by boarding priority not seat location — they have open seating. So it is doable.
>> A much more blatant example of inefficiency is *de*boarding. Normally planes deboard from the front to the back, with 30+ people in line waiting on a single person up ahead to grab their stuff. The process would complete ~10 times faster if, every time two people are both trying to leave, the person sitting in a seat yields to someone waiting in the aisle behind them.
In practice I don't think you could de-board 10x faster, or anywhere close. Any short delays in one part are smoothed out further up the plane. If there's a hold-up in row 90, then that just means rows 89 and under deboard faster, etc. I imagine you will almost always have full flow through the slowest part (eg: the door), at least until you get down to the last handful of people (at which point people probably are much more likely to give way if they are causing a blockage.)
That is not correct, consider what the bottleneck is. The bottleneck is people doing things that block the aisle while not moving forward; taking things out of the overhead bins, or looking back towards their seat to grab items. Under the current method, only one person can be doing that at a time. Under my method, dozens can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=oAHbLRjF0vo
I don't think it works like this in practice. Every bottleneck just opens up space for someone else to move faster ahead of the bottleneck. Unless you're standing, blocked, in like row 50, and rows 1-49 have completely de-boarded, and there's a clear aisle all the way to the exit, then being blocked for 20 seconds is not actually slowing anything down.
In practice, if you're blocked for 20 seconds in row 50, that just means some extra space opens up in the aisle for row 49, so row 49 de-boards faster. If they're all gone, then it opens up more space for row 48, etc.
Every minute you're standing there blocked means you're not blocking the aisle for someone ahead, who ends up de-boarding faster.
Edit: I've just seen the bit right at the end of your link, which suggests that the worst possible method is going strictly front to back, which I agree is bad. I've just not seen this in practice (maybe this is a US thing?) But yes, I agree that if you're the forward-most person left on the plane, then causing a blockage is bad and you shouldn't do it. However if there's blockages ahead of you and slow moving traffic, then causing a blockage in row 50 has no impact, as far as I can tell.
The fundamental factual issue is whether passengers are going out of the plane as fast as possible — i.e. whether the door is the binding constraint. If so, Ben is correct.
One test is whether there are times when nobody is going out because the front end of the line is empty. I don't think I have seen that.
In what country do you live?
I suppose gate space is probably a lot less important than runway space
I agree, just pointing out it would be a disruptive change. Still worth it in the long term!
As someone who flies quite a bit in Japan and a certain amount between Japan and other places, your comments are interesting.
JAL domestic, which is what I fly most, allows IIRC one free checked bag and there are no TSA thieves. They do X-ray that bag to look for suspicious things though. Although I usually fly with just carry on, I have never lost a checked bag with JAL. In fact they are sufficiently proud of their goal of zero lost bags that, coincidentally, they were on Japanese TV last night showing the almost total automation of the baggage system in Haneda.
JAL used to board from back to front but about a year ago they started boarding window, middle, aisle. I'm not sure it made a lot of difference because boarding in Japan tends to be very fast anyway - typically a 90%+ loaded 737 boards in about 15 minutes and it is not uncommon for boarding to be complete and the jetway disconnected a few minutes before scheduled departure time. That's probably because not many people have masses of carry on (see free checked bag above) - people like me with a roll bag and a laptop bag are rare and because we are fairly rare it is extremely rare that there is not enough space on the overhead baggage area for whatever people want to stow there.
A couple of other notes. On JAL or other domestic Japanese airlines you can usually board without showing anyone your "government issued picture ID" or indeed any ID. You have checked in using the app, you show the app to get through security and again as you board and that's it - or you can use the JAL credit card for JAL flights the same way. Only when you leave Japan do you have to do something like show a passport. Also JAL domestic flights allow you to have glass bottles of booze in your carry on, which last time I was in the US or Europe was definitely a no no. I take advantage of that to not check in my bag on my returns from international flights where I've purchased booze that is either unavailable or very expensive in rural Japan
There was a WSJ article a few years ago on loading order - it found that airlines had tested multiple methods and none mattered b/c the boarding time was determined by the random presence of people trying to stuff stuff into overhead bins that didn't easily fit, getting things out of stuff going into overhead bins in the aisle instead of before boarding, etc. Those holdups dominated any gains from particular seating order. So they mostly board by your status, making higher status people (me!) not have to wait as long. I'm ok with that. :>
One of the reasons airlines check carry-ons at the gate is that too many carry-ons slow the boarding process, as people fiddle with them and search for a spot. Why the airlines don't just do "carry-on size bags travel as checked luggage free" is beyond me.
From the passenger's viewpoint, there's another reason to bring the bag to the gate - on flights in small aircraft the airline will offer to "gate check" the bag since the small airplanes don't have room. Those bags you keep until boarding, and get back immediately when getting off the plane. You just grab it yourself off the luggage cart - no waiting for the baggage carousel.
That doesn't make much sense to me since the boarding method David described should significantly reduce the time it takes people to find a place for their bags in the overhead bin, because many people can then do it in parallel. Should speed things up by maybe 3-5X i would think. If that's not the case, it's not clear why
"What does the world get for that cost?"
The ability to pay twice as much for the customs officers stamping the passports?
My observation (in the EU at least) is that the time taken to load everyone's luggage on board the plane (and fuel, etc) is much greater than the time taken to load on all the people, so there is no saving to the airline in getting people to board more efficiently. Any time I've taken a flight, we have all boarded (slowly) and then sat around waiting anyway.
Also, I would much rather queue for slightly longer with my family (who will be sitting next to me), than be forced to separate from them in order to queue more efficiently alongside the person sitting directly in front of and behind me.
These two things combined mean that whilst there will be a lot of individuals wasting time on an inefficient queueing system, changing the system to suit them doesn't suit everyone, and doesn't end up benefiting the airline.
From the airline's perspective, as long as everyone is boarded by the time they need to leave, there is no cost to them for slow boarding. And I suspect that (especially when you account for people like me, who travel with family), forcing people to queue separately from the people they are sitting next to is not something that people are, on average, willing to pay much more for.
One could avoid that problem by letting people sitting next to each other who are traveling together board together, treat two or three people as a single unit in my system.
Those of us who try to pack lightly so as not to over-fill the overhead compartment are punished for it too. Recently I was on a smaller commuter flight for the first leg of my trip and the announcement before we boarded told those of us with smaller carry-ons to put them under the seats in front of us so that the larger bags will fit up above. I didn't notice the agent at the gate even checking the size of the carry-ons, and some of them were quite large. I had purposely used a small backpack along with my purse, so that I wouldn't take up too much space, but with both of those bags under the seat in front of mine, I would have no space for my feet. Then, when I realized there actually was space for my bag, as the flight attendant was closing the compartments, I asked to put my bag up there, and she scolded me for delaying the flight. Grr.
I use my carry-on for everything of value that I don't want broken or stolen or lost by the TSA agents (as has happened to friends of mine), so I will always check a bag with my normal usual items, but bring a carry-on with valuables and medicines that I want to keep an eye on.
I also include one set of clothes in my carry-on just in case the checked luggage doesn't make it—if necessary I can hand wash one set, wear the other. I'm not sure if that precaution is still necessary or not.
Good point. Actually last fall, my suitcase was delayed by a day when I went to the Netherlands. I should have done that, because I ended up having to borrow clothes from my daughters.
Thanks. That tells me that I should keep doing it, at least when traveling abroad.
Sample size of two but I just recently had a bag fail to arrive on a flight from Norway to DC via Iceland. Thankfully it was the return leg so it was pretty straightforward to have the airline mail the bag to my house, but it would have been a much bigger problem on the way out.
Thanks.
I don't know if it still happens for flights within the US.
Free Checked Carry-On-Size Bags
Your suggestion that it
might pay for the airline to accept checked bags that fit the carry-on size limit for free leaves off substantially all of the analysis from the airline’s perspective, of why it may not be a good idea. Some considerations that an airline may have include:
-- Many airlines structure their fees to achieve material revenue from checked bags;
-- Allowing passengers to check a carry-on size bag for free then leads to two scenarios that are more expensive for the airline (1) passengers get to take a second carry-on bag on the plane without paying additional fees, or (2) the gate agents are now charged with verifying passengers, who have checked a carry-on size bag for free, do not carry one onto the plane—making the process of checking boarding passes and allowing passengers to board the plane much more difficult.
-- The tagging, tracking, handling, and transport required for checked bags costs the airlines far more than it costs to allow passengers to bring bags on a flight.
TSA
I believe the TSA does care whether an agent steals or vandalizes a passenger’s luggage. Whether they have procedures in place to sufficiently disincentivize this is less obvious. We, or at least I, don’t know the extent to which TSA checked-bag searches are recorded on camera, and whether there is a record of which bags were searched and when, so that it may be determined which agent searched a passenger’s bag even without having a slip of paper put into the searched bag.
Loading Planes
There are many ways in which boarding and deboarding planes could be sped up. My observation is that a window / middle / aisle boarding order would make much less of an impact than no-overhead-carry-on / overhead-carry-on order, with the overhead carry-on boarding, as you suggest, from the back to the front. However, then the complexities of group travel (more than one traveler) come into play--whether it is families with kids, people who may need a little help, or simply travelers who want to board together—and their reaction to being separated may not be positive. This boarding system may be theoretically more efficient but may cause an undue amount of passenger unhappiness.
On The Ground
Given that you waited half an hour for an Uber to never show, and it was more expensive than a traditional cab, that would suggest that this was a surge period with fewer Uber drivers available. If Uber was at all times more expensive than a cab, wouldn’t the market eventually correct for this—people would stop taking Uber from Reagan National until Uber’s prices were more competitive?
The Cost Of The Passport System
A common way to look at the cost of wasting an individual’s time is to assign a value that is, in some way, derived from the potential economic output of that individual, assuming they were not waiting, in this case in a passport line, that they would be generating economic output. This is often an incorrect perspective. They may have been simply getting to a hotel earlier and playing a computer/smartphone game, which they can also do while waiting in line. Or they may be getting business or personal work done on their smartphone. If you have invited someone over to watch a movie at your home and they show up an hour late, is the cost to you an hour of your economic output? Probably not because you are still getting things done before they arrive. Smartphones and other portable devices have enabled people to get things done, whether they be business-related or personal or playing computer games, while out and about. While there may be a cost to waiting in a passport line, it is likely to be appreciably less than an equivalent amount of that person’s productive time, and is probably more related to lost opportunity cost.
So far as your revenue point, the change would make flying on average less expensive so airlines could at the same time raise fares a little without losing customers.
"The tagging, tracking, handling, and transport required for checked bags costs the airlines far more than it costs to allow passengers to bring bags on a flight."
Can you point me at your source for that data?
Note that they are bearing those costs at present for the excess bags that they check for free, although not for the ones they fit on.
My view of the cost of waiting in line is based mostly on my experience, and I don't generally find that I can get anything done then. You may be correct that many others do. On the other hand, they are doing it under less comfortable circumstances than they usually work in.
"Can you point me at your source for that data?"
I don't have a specific source that indicates it costs more for an airline to handle a passenger's baggage than for the passenger to handle it. But it does seem intuitive that if I carry my bag and stow it in an overhead compartment, then, upon deplaning, remove it from the overhead compartment and carry it off myself, it will cost less than if I give my bag to an airline staff member who then issues me a receipt tag, tags the bag, then carries the bag to a cart which is driven to the plane and loaded into the cargo hold. Then, upon arrival, the bag is then removed from the cargo hold and put onto a cart which is driven to a baggage claim area, unloaded and put onto a baggage claim carousel, with the bag being scanned several times in this process.
More evidence of the cost is that airlines typically charge $25 to $75 per checked bag and, whether this is tied to their out-of-pocket costs plus a profit margin, or is based on a value-pricing model, airlines would reasonably perceive a loss of some percentage of this amount if the bag were checked in with no charge.
Southwest does not charge for the first two bags, so the evidence on how significant the cost is is ambiguous. I'm sure it costs something, but the hassle of passengers dealing with bags as overhead luggage costs something too — it makes the boarding (and unboarding) process slower and less pleasant. That imposes some costs directly on the airline, some indirectly by lowering the quality of the service they are selling hence the price they can sell it for.
"Southwest does not charge for the first two bags, so the evidence on how significant the cost is is ambiguous."
This is not a logically correct statement. Just because one company does not have an explicit charge for something does not demonstrate the ambiguity of the significance of the cost of that thing. For example, Amazon.com does not charge for return shipping for most products, yet it is not ambiguous that the cost is significant.
If I am understanding correctly, I think your argument is, in essence, that airlines should consider shifting to a more checked-bag inclusive pricing methodology because you feel the additional costs to the airlines would be more than offset by the additional revenues they would generate.
The evidence that the costs are substantial is that some airlines charge for checked luggage. The evidence that they are not substantial is that an airline doesn't charge. So the evidence is ambiguous. That doesn't mean that one claim or the other couldn't be established with other evidence.
One reason planes do not board back-to-front is tipping. As in, an actual wheelie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLWxD0gY__A
Some airlines have invested in tail stands to offset this, but I understand they're simply not widely adopted. One more thing to add and remove, I suppose.
Not much of a problem if you board all window passengers then all middle seat passengers then all aisle passengers. In the worst case you get only a third of the imbalance.
TSA, Visa system and Passport controls etc. are classic examples of activity without productivity.
Visa issuance can very easily be outsourced. Let different companies be in charge of issuing Visa to foreigners. Only worry about those who overstay or otherwise break the terms of the visa and fine the companies accordingly. As long as there is enough competition we will see these companies come up with creative ways to not just reduce visa offenses but increase the number of travelers into USA.
You left out one additional reason for carrying on a bag instead of checking it: because its contents are things you don't want anyone else handling except yourself. This is not fear of vandalism; it's just knowledge of how airport baggage handlers typically handle luggage (which anyone can see by looking out the window of the airplane and watching them do it). When I travel by air, I have two bags: one has my laptop in it (actually there are usually two, my work laptop and my personal laptop); the other has my CPAP machine. I'm not letting anyone else handle either of those bags. No airline employee has yet asked me why I don't check the bags (even the two bags combined are within the size requirement for carry-ons), but if they did, the above would be my response.
Fair point.
I often wonder why they don't load planes like you described. I suspect it has to do with selling earlier access to boarding the plane. Perhaps enough people have missed a flight in their lives that they have significant stress reduced after boarding.
The real question is how they know that there’s too much luggage for the overhead bins, before people start stuffing things in there. I’ve heard them come up with a random “target” for the number of people who need to check their carry-on bag, as if it’s a science.
My guess is that they have a figure for what fraction of passengers, on average, bring bags for overhead check-in.
Our rule is if we're going to travel a lot on trains at our destination, we try hard to have carry-ons only, as dealing with significant amounts of luggage in crowded and enormous train stations - especially in places like India or Japan (in Japan, train station transfer walks can go for miles) - is an enormous pain. We use the military "roll method" for stowing clothes, which is far more efficient than folding clothes, but it does mean that we end up with quite heavy luggage...
It also means our luggage won't be out of our sight, which is a good thing...
Except for those actually needing time to get seated, most airlines seat preferred customers first to keep their custom. Just good marketing.
Stuff disappears from luggage regardless of whether you go through TSA or check it. If you don’t want to monitor it closely in hand, ship it separately. Surely any libertarian recognizes that a government which is actively monitoring possessions and controlling population movement likely has reasons other than the asserted need for safety. The price of all that paperwork, surveillance gear, workers (tsa, customs, immigration agents at airports) defies any notion that economy is an issue. The problems Tulsi Gabbard suffered flying after she bucked her party is clear evidence of the nefarious intent of all this expensive “safely.” There are way cheaper ways to be safe, but they do not train people in compliance.
If I go through TSA for carry-on it is a lot harder for someone to steal stuff than if I check it. Normally they X-ray luggage, only open it to search with you watching.
Bingo on just ship it. I've been doing that since 9/11 and saves all sort of hassle, picked the tip up from work where likewise we just drop ship everything before we arrive. Hotels accept shipments just fine as will your friends and family you are visiting
Also less chance customs stealing your data or having to answer all sorts of questions you don't want to bother with. Nowadays I just travel with a passport, two credit cards, some cash, and a burner phone, way less hassle.
Lufthansa group (except for Eurowings) do the boarding similar to the way you describe. Or more precisely, group 1 and 2 are priority (business class etc) and the group 3 is window seats, 4 middle and group 5 aisle. But nothing about row numbers, probably would be to complicated
Except that Southwest lines people up by boarding number (not seat number) to board, so I don't see why they couldn't do it by seat number.
What I mean is that at some point granularity becomes too high to be efficient. People come late are confused about how the system works, try to game the system and go earlier etc.
Also different airlines has different intentions with boarding groups, in Europe some airlines have the last boarding group for people with tariff that does not include bigger trolley carry-on baggage for example.
Status passengers are another complication as they can board any time and can sit anywhere