Following Up on Bag Check Rules by Joe Sharkey originally appeared in the New York Times on March 17, 2014. Here’s an excerpt…
And Barbara Quinn is skeptical about the “strangely misshapen” sizer boxes that are used to measure bags, which some other readers said don’t readily accommodate odd-size bags that are otherwise of reasonable size, like some backpacks.
So let’s not forget traveling musicians. A violin, viola or saxophone case does not fit in the standard sizer, for example. “My son is the violist of an internationally renowned string quarter. He travels about twice a month, all over the world,” said Judy Amory. It would be folly to consign a valuable, fragile instrument like that to the checked-bag system. “Musicians are an obvious category where one-size-fits-all simply cannot work,” she pointed out.
And of course, consider flight attendants, referees of the bag wars as they mediate passenger disputes and often physically hoist and pound bags into crammed overhead bins.
Heather Poole is a flight attendant for a major airline who wrote what I consider one of the most amusing books in the flight attendant memoir genre, “Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crash Pads, Crew Drama and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet” (2012). The bin wars are “my biggest peeve,” Ms. Poole said:
“I’ve had passengers actually take someone’s bag out of a bin to make room for their own bag, leaving the other person’s bag in the middle of the aisle for passengers behind them to step over. It’s out of control.”
Heather Poole 