Travelling can be stressful. Busy airports, long and tiring journeys, delayed flights. But there is something about aircraft overhead storage bins that sparks anxiety in even the calmest of travelers.
As a regular traveler myself, the thought of no room above my head for my hand luggage brings a real fear. I paid for that space and I follow the hand luggage restriction rules.
To prevent this happening I always try to board early. Standing in the queue at the gate, it often feels as though I am about to begin a race, everyone smiling at each other but we all have the same goal in mind: overhead storage domination.
My anxiety obviously stems from arriving at my seat on more than one occasion where there has been no room for my luggage, and yes it is not the end of the world, but it is flipping annoying.
I have also taken note of when this has happened to other passengers around me and we all seem to have the same reaction. As polite South Africans we won’t shout out “Whose bag is this?” and remove it to put our bag in its rightful place – although we want to. There are unwritten social etiquette that prevent us from doing so. Rather we stand staring at the full bin looking confused and glancing around at the passengers in our immediate vicinity for help.
The seated passengers look at you sympathetically, but inside secretly relieved that their bags are safely stowed above their heads. For some reason the person whose bag it is never says anything – probably looking straight ahead, pretending to be oblivious to your plight. By now the queue of people waiting for you to sit down has grown, so you have no choice but to settle for locating another space or squeezing your bag under the chair in front of you – which makes for an extra uncomfortable journey.
My first job in travel was working for an airline handling company at OR Tambo International Airport. One of my responsibilities included checking the size and weight of hand luggage.
I would stand in front of the check-in counters, greeting passengers and approving hand luggage by labeling it with a yellow tag so that the other ground staff would know that it was acceptable to take on board.
I checked so many bags that my right arm was like a scale, accurate to the gram of how much a bag weighed. Yes, I was that good. I hated telling passengers that they had too much hand luggage or that they had to transfer items into their checked luggage due to weight restrictions but I found the best way to break the bad news was to be empathetic but firm.
On more than one occasion I received a few choice words from enraged passengers and even once had a (heavy) hand luggage bag literally thrown at me, but it goes with the territory. Travelling can bring out the worst in people.
A hand luggage allowance is given by airlines to allow travelers to carry valuables with them on-board the flight and also to carry items they may require while traveling.
The rules are simple:
1 bag + 1 slimline laptop bag per economy class passenger.
No bag should exceed these dimensions: 56cm + 36cm + 23cm = total dimension of 115cm including handles and wheels.
Weight limit per bag: 7kg.
A woman’s handbag and a man’s satchel / “man-bag” is considered part of dress code and is exempt from these regulations.
In my experience, people will try all sorts of tricks to get away with more hand luggage.
They will leave bags with their non-flying family members so that it looks like they only have one item at check-in and then saddle up with the rest of the items when they are out of view of ground staff.
Or, they will nonchalantly walk past ground staff at the boarding gate swinging their bulky satchel as if it were so light it contained only air but I would see them dragging the same bag through passport control, red-faced and sweating from its burden.
Other times, passengers would arrive at the boarding gate with what looked like 50 000 duty-free shopping bags.
Or their “handbag” which is considered exempt would be big enough to double as a sleeping bag in case it got nippy on-board.
Unfortunately for these would-be rule breakers – I was on duty, and I always do my job properly. Without the yellow tag, your bag had no access to the cabin and many a bag had to be confiscated to the hold of the aircraft for the greater good of all passengers on board. Some of these passengers were even charged for excess luggage.
Is there a solution to this madness? Yes, I believe there is:
As not all of us can afford to travel business class for the additional hand luggage allowance you get perhaps you can be considerate of others when planning your carry-on items – you are not Houdini and if you think you have too much hand luggage, you are probably right. Also, airlines should hire more ground staff (like me) to prevent people from taking too many bags on-board.
If that is not possible then feel free to Tweet or Instagram photos of obviously oversized carry-on luggage with #CarryonShame. The campaign, started by a journalist in the US by the name of Spud Hilton was aimed at pushing airlines to crack down on passengers breaking the rules and bringing on board excess bags. And if all else fails, at least we will get a laugh out of it.
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