The baggage we carry
Recently, I was on a very full British Airways flight from London to Brussels. When we were apprised of this situation via an announcement at the gate, flight staff offered passengers the option of checking their carry-on baggage for free. Few of those assembled took up the offer, but it was abundantly clear to everyone that a mad scramble for overhead bin space was about to ensue. Before the boarding call was announced, people began pre-emptively lining up, grimly eyeing those around them to see how much heat, or, at least, luggage, they were packing.
As we boarded the flight, we were told that overhead bins must be used primarily for roller bags and larger items. Being a light packer, I was not carrying a large case on wheels; all I had with me was a medium-sized backpack and a bag that carried my laptop and jacket. I therefore placed my backpack in the overhead bin and my handbag under the seat in front of me.
There was still plenty of room in the overhead compartment when I took my assigned seat. But it soon became clear that this situation would not last for long, primarily because a number of people seated in the back half of the plane, seeing empty overhead bins towards the front end, stowed their luggage there as they made their way to their assigned seat.1 By this point, stowing cabin baggage had become the equivalent of a game of musical chairs, with everyone scrambling to find a spot before the music stopped, and they were left literally holding the bag. Soon, the overhead storage in the front section of the plane was completely full, although there were still plenty of vacant seats in the early rows.
As my own section filled with passengers, people wheeling large carry-on cases began glaring resentfully at my backpack in the overhead compartment and muttering about ‘selfish’ passengers putting their luggage in the ‘wrong’ spot. These rumbles of annoyance soon caught the attention of a flight attendant. ‘Whose backpack is this?’, she demanded, marching over and pulling it out of the overhead bin. ‘It’s mine’, I responded, in a tone intended to imply, ‘Go ahead and ask me to move it; I dare you’.
She opened her mouth to tell me to do just that and then noticed the bag at my feet. Realising that the backpack was, in fact, my larger item, and that she couldn’t justifiably ask me to remove it, she put the bag back – much to the annoyance of a guy wheeling an oversize roller bag, who turned out to be seated in my row and gave me death glares the entire flight.2
Could I have given in and moved the backpack under my seat at this point? Technically, yes. It would have been a tight fit next to my bag, but I could have squeezed it in. Still, although the trip was not much over an hour long, and I had borne much longer flights with much less legroom, I had decided that it was now a matter of Principle. ‘Why should someone who brought a large case onto the plane get to travel in relative comfort while I’m forced to give up all available legroom just because I’m a light packer?’, I thought to myself. For better or worse, this had become a hill I was prepared to die on.3
Now, I tell you this story not merely to illustrate something that I think we both already know, which is that I am, on occasion, a bit of an arsehole, but to draw your attention to the peculiarities of air travel itself, which is a distinctively human phenomenon. This is not primarily because we are the only flightless animal to have invented it, but because air travel relies on a degree of cooperation amongst strangers that is arguably unique to humans.
Many animals cooperate; some, like insect colonies, are renowned for it. However, humans are distinctive in cooperating with complete strangers. As the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy notes in her book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, each year 1.6 billion passengers fly to destinations around the world, requiring extraordinary feats of cooperation that most of us take for granted.
Just think for a moment about what air travel typically involves for those of us not rich enough to fly private jets or business class. First, we wait in long lines to check in. Then we wait in long lines to go through security screening, where we must divest ourselves of various items of clothing, have our belongings x-rayed and pawed through, and potentially suffer the indignity of being patted down by a security guard. And that’s just the beginning of the ordeal, for we must then board an aircraft where we are packed in like sardines and forced into close confines with complete strangers for interminable hours on end.
To illustrate just how miraculous these acts of cooperation are, Hrdy asks the reader to imagine what would happen if the passengers on a flight suddenly morphed into apes. As she notes, ‘Any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached… Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles’. Of course, that’s assuming that the flight made it back safely to ground rather than exploding in mid-air or crashing into the Indian Ocean.
That said, we are not quite so patient and cooperative as Hrdy makes out. According to the Dallas Morning News, in 2022 the US Federal Aviation Authority reported that there were 2,359 reports of unruly passengers on board flights – some of which required flights to be diverted or aborted altogether. Indeed, footage of spectacular fights on planes has become ubiquitous in the digital era. Still, while it’s not the sort of environment likely to affirm one’s faith in humanity, the instances we see of rude, inconsiderate and selfish behaviour – and the fights they occasionally engender – stand out primarily because they are exceptions that prove the rule that makes air travel (and society at large) possible: cooperation.
A good illustration of such is a recent image that went viral of a woman at an airport in Argentina who had committed what the Daily Mail calls4 the ‘unforgivable sin’ of not moving up in an airport check-in line. When asked why she wasn’t moving, the woman allegedly responded, ‘It’s the same if I move now or later’.
Of course, she’s technically right insofar as she will not get to the counter one whit faster if she lines up directly behind the next passenger or stops metres away, but that is not the point of the queue. Instead, she has violated the unwritten social covenant underpinning it: namely, the principle of cooperation. We move not to get to our destination faster but to show that we are cooperating with the system as a whole, which is why so many people were outraged by her action (or inaction, as it were).
Although tensions can run high during air travel, especially when conditions are crowded and flights are delayed, instances where cooperation breaks down completely are relatively rare. It’s therefore instructive to consider the contexts where conflict is most likely. Based on media coverage, infractions that have sparked fights on flights include reclined seats, parents not stopping their children from kicking the back of the seat in front of them, arguments over who is entitled to overhead bag space, who gets to put their elbow on the armrest and the order of deplaning.5
While booze is often a contributing factor to ‘air rage’, another critical but oft-ignored element is the infrastructure of the plane itself. Take, for example, the humble armrest. The shared armrest on the plane is often a source of tension between passengers flying economy and we generally treat this as a problem of etiquette. For example, the Australian comedian Jim Jefferies argues that the passenger in the middle seat is automatically entitled to both armrests because they have the lost the seating allocation crapshoot – having neither the comfort of the window nor the freedom of the aisle at their disposal.
However, it’s more fundamentally a problem of infrastructure than armrest etiquette. As the sociologist Susan Leigh Star observed, although most of us don’t give a second thought to infrastructures, which, when we think of them at all, seem tremendously boring, they structure our everyday lives in highly significant ways. After all, one way to definitively resolve the problem of who gets to use them is to simply make the middle armrests wide enough to comfortably house two elbows. But that would mean that airplane seats in economy are not standardised, and are thus more expensive to produce.6
Another infrastructural feature that causes potential breakdowns in cooperation is the size of seats and the distance between them. Although a recent article in Forbes disputes the veracity of the claim that airline seats have shrunk in size, it affirms that seat pitch – i.e., the distance between rows – has become narrower on many airlines. This means that conditions get particularly cramped when people recline their seat (another key source of conflict on flights7) because there is less space between rows. In effect, what initially looks like a problem between individuals starts to look more like an effect of infrastructures and the standards they entail.
Nowhere is the power of standardisation and infrastructure more evident than in the context of cabin baggage, which serves to highlight what Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star describe in their book Standards and Their Stories as the nested and interlocking nature of standards. An illustration of such knock-on effects can be found in the changing standards surrounding seat pitch. Not only does a reduction in seat pitch cause problems when reclining one’s seat,8 but it also effectively reduces the luggage space under the seat, because that space has to accommodate legs and feet as well as belongings.
A reduction in usable space under the seat means that more overhead baggage space is required; thus, changing the former affects the latter – a problem exacerbated by the fact that most airlines now charge for checked luggage. This has created further knock-on effects, primarily because passengers are now highly incentivised to limit themselves to cabin baggage only, thus increasing the volume they bring on the flight. This, in turn, has led to the creation, or, at least, enforcement of strict standards for cabin baggage in terms of the number of items allowed and their required weight and size.9
Suitcase manufacturers, in their turn, make bags that precisely fit these standardised dimensions to maximise the amount of hand luggage passengers can take on the flight. But many planes, especially older ones, do not have overhead compartments that are designed to accommodate large roller bags – or, in point of fact, the sheer volume of luggage they are now required to hold as a result of the other aforementioned knock-on effects of changes to seating and pricing. Thus, as one flight attendant notes, a key part of their job has become figuring out how to fit passengers’ hand luggage on the plane, kind of like a giant game of Tetris.
The consequence of these changes is that passengers who max out their cabin luggage allowance by carrying large roller bags do potentially end up with the most legroom, because the overhead compartment is the only space their case can be accommodated, even though airlines rely on the passengers carrying more modest luggage to ensure that all the cabin baggage fits on the flight. Although it might seem unfair, it’s simply a byproduct of infrastructures and standardisation.
So the next time you’re on a flight, annoyed by that arsehole who thinks he’s entitled to all the overhead cabin space because he chose to bring a huge roller bag on the plane rather than checking it when he had the chance, or, conversely, you simply can’t get over that arsehole who could have put her backpack under her seat but selfishly chose to take up precious overhead real estate instead, pause for a moment to consider the real arsehole: the plane fit out, the roller bag and the airline itself.
Then, grit your teeth, and remind yourself that putting the person annoying you into a headlock, wrestling them to the ground and pummelling them in the manner of a silverback gorilla fighting off competitors might be intensely satisfying, but it was cooperation and compromise that got humans off the ground in the first place. Then go ahead and put your damn bag under the damn seat, because nobody is going anywhere until all the cabin luggage is stowed!
Although considered to be bad form, this used to happen occasionally on flights. However, it has now become such a regular occurrence that flight attendants turn a blind eye to it, although the people sitting in the earlier rows end up getting shafted. Basically, trying to wade through the sea of bodies in the aisle to either put your luggage in an empty overhead compartment at the back of the plane, or to retrieve it at the end of the flight, is like wading through the Red Sea – except there’s no Moses around to part it for you.
He seemed to think that my backpack was some sort of Tardis that was much larger than it appeared and that its removal would magically create enough space for his ginormous case. And they say that women can’t think in three dimensions!
As anyone who has ever met me can attest, I have many such hills.
Rightly, in my view.
I must confess to having some sympathy for the combatants in several of these fights. All I know is that if I had access to the culling chant from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Lullaby – a deadly rhyme that turns the person who has memorised it into a serial killer who unwittingly causes the death of anyone who annoys them – half of my fellow travellers would be dead. The woman on my recent trip to Belgium who decided to decant her toiletries into a Ziplock bag just as she was about to load her case onto the conveyor belt for the x-ray scanner? Dead.* The elderly man who kept opening up his window screen to let in blazing sunshine on a long-haul flight from Vancouver to Munich when everyone was trying to sleep? Dead. The five-year-old who repeatedly kicked the back of my seat for an entire flight from Vancouver to London? Also, I’m sorry to say, dead.
* And hopefully in the Sixth Circle of Hell for acts of minor unspeakable evil. Of course, I myself would be in the Seventh Circle of Hell for serial acts of violence, but it would provide some consolation to know that she was suffering with me.
There’s a reason why fewer people get into fights in premium economy and business, and it’s certainly not because they attract a more ‘civilised’ class of passenger. Budget airlines have seen more than their fair share of fights primarily because the structures and infrastructures of the plane itself are far more likely to bring passengers into conflict.
I was once on a flight when a man sitting behind me – actually, the same man who kept opening his window screen on an overnight flight – yelled out ‘Stop!’ when I reclined my chair and then promptly complained to the flight attendant. The flight attendant politely asked if I would be willing to put my chair back in its upright position, although the only reason I’d reclined it in the first place was because the passenger in front of me had put their own chair into full recline mode, and I could no longer focus on my TV screen, what with it now being a mere inch from my nose. When I explained this to her, she shrugged helplessly; she clearly knew the request was unreasonable. However, in the interests of maintaining the peace, I reluctantly acceded. Still, I got my own back the next time he opened his window screen to see if it was just as light outside as it had been the last hour he’d checked. (Spoiler alert: it was.) ‘Stop!’, I yelled loudly; I’m happy to report that he did.
This, of course, is why various airlines have removed the capacity to recline seats. To the relief of tall people everywhere, the infrastructural problem created by reducing seat pitch has received an infrastructural fix: making seats non-reclinable.
As we all know, budget airlines tend to be the strictest in requiring passengers to adhere to these requirements, leading to all sorts of tactics on the part of passengers to get around them – as Lampland and Star note, people don’t just passively comply with standards but quickly develop shortcuts and workarounds. I speak purely hypothetically, of course, but common tactics include putting handbags into backpacks, taking stuff out of one’s case and getting someone else to mind it in the event that the airline weighs hand luggage during check-in, and so on.