Improve flying by banning overhead bins
Scene: Arrivals checkpoint, London Heathrow, Terminal Two. Look for lineup of those carrying a European Union passport, which by fluke of parentage (father) you happen to possess in addition to Canadian one. Join queue, scan British passport and look at screen, which in turn scans face. Paddle doors fly open.
Proceed to baggage claim, where suitcase already removed from carousel and set among neat lines of luggage nearby. Pick up suitcase. Entire process takes eight — 8 — minutes.
Which brings to mind, and not so fondly, another disembarking process that takes nearly four times as long: Simply moving from seat 37D to the plane’s door. This comes at the end of a transatlantic flight, when everyone’s anxious to vacate the giant cigar tube of the heavens.
Yet there we stand with our tiny satchel in hand — personal toiletries, a book, reading glasses, iPhone and travel documents — waiting to move.
From the vantage point of 37D, the reason is soon maddeningly clear. It’s all those overhead bins that come between your seat and the exit.
People are struggling to remove seri- ously bulky luggage from above. Some of it comes crashing down. It’s like finding yourself in what should be a free-flowing vein, but instead beholding only platelets ahead, clotting.
It took the same amount of time to board the plane in the first place, so an hour of one’s life has passed — a needless, pointless hour, since scarcely anyone rummages through the overhead bins midflight.
Almost everything there is “not wanted on the voyage.” So why is it even in the cabin, undisturbed while airborne?
Here’s a modest proposal: Banish all overhead bins on jumbo-sized, long-haul flights. The bins make sense on short jaunts in smaller planes, say, Toronto to Montreal for an overnight. But for trips lasting several hours, ban the bins. It will save travellers and the airlines nearly an hour each way, time that equals money and/or aggravation for everyone involved.
So what happens if you need access to some personal items during the flight? Chances are you haven’t packed them in the overhead bins, but instead put them in a bag or purse that stows easily under the seat in front of you. Imagine landing and the only thing you have to do is reach conveniently down for your immediate belongings before getting off the plane.
Cue the objections. You fret about lost or mishandled luggage, so decide to take as much into the cabin as possible. As it happens, the best airlines have reduced the amount of stray luggage to as low as 0.001 per cent. So a human trait holds true here. We’re notoriously bad at as- sessing the real risk of an event with potentially terrible consequences but low probability.
Are you travelling with small children, and thus need access to diapers, teddy bears, hand-held computer games and the like? Well, you have a lot of space under the seat in front of you, and in front of the kids’ seats. If there are especially onerous needs, surely they can be accommodated without resorting to a long line of bins. Flight attendants are wizards at resolving those sorts of issues.
Or consider the winter coat. Why not put it in your soon-to-be checked suitcase once you get to the airport, since it won’t be needed in Cuba, or stash it under the seat?
The alternative, overhead bins, panders to a kind of Parkinson’s Law: Stuff expands to fill the space allotted to it, with dreary results. Anyone with a garage or shed crammed to the rafters knows this all-too-wincingly well. So why not just ban the bins on long flights?
You’ll carry less on board, but you’ve already checked one piece of luggage, so why not two if necessary, even at a small cost? Just maybe, you’ll start packing fewer things and, in a less-imperfect world, the airlines might even recognize the cost savings and reward you accordingly. But even if they don’t, your fellow passengers will thank you from the bottom of their little satchels.