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A man grunts and sighs in the crowded aisle next to you. His backpack swats your shoulder. “If an overhead bin is shut, that means it is full,” a flight attendant announces over the intercom. A passenger in yoga pants backtracks through the throng with a carry-on the size of a steamer trunk—“Sorry, sorry,” she mutters; the bag will need to be checked to her final destination. Travelers squish aside to make way for her, pressing against one another inappropriately in the process. Nobody is happy.
Among the many things to hate about air travel, the processing of cabin luggage is ascendant. Planes are packed, and everyone seems to have more and bigger stuff than the aircraft can accommodate. The rabble holding cheap tickets who board last are most affected, but even jet-setters with elite status seem to worry about bag space; they hover in front of gates hoping to board as soon as possible—“gate lice,” they’re sometimes called. Travelers are rightly infuriated by the situation: a crisis of carry-ons that someone must be responsible for, and for which someone must pay.
I’m a traveler who believes that someone must pay, and on a recent flight to Fort Lauderdale, I came across a suspect. The idea popped into my brain, and then got stuck. My theory was a simple one. We know that airlines overbook their seats, then count on no-shows and rebookings to make the system work. This helps ensure that each flight will be as full as possible, but it also leads to situations where passengers must be paid to take a different flight. What if the airlines are doing the same thing with overhead bins and “allowing” more carry-on luggage than a plane can even hold? What if they’re overbooking those compartments in the hopes or expectation that some passengers won’t bother with a Rollaboard and will simply check their bags instead?
If that’s the case, then the aisle pandemonium can’t be chalked up to passengers’ misbehavior or to honest confusion at the gate. No, it would mean that all this hassle is a natural outcome of the airlines’ cabin-stowage arbitrage. It would indicate inconvenience by design.
As I tried to settle in my seat, ducking under other people’s arms, a sense of outrage began to tingle in my fingers and my toes. When I looked around the cabin, I now saw a scene of mass betrayal. No matter how hard we try, I thought, we’ll never squeeze our bags into these bins. Gate checks are inevitable. The fix is in.
Could overbooking luggage be the root of the carry-on crisis? I needed to investigate. On a subsequent flight to Phoenix in an American Airlines Boeing 737-800, I began to gather evidence. As soon as the seat-belt sign had extinguished, I got up to count the seats and bins. There were 26 six-seat rows in economy, and four rows of four seats in first class, for a total capacity of 172 luggage-encumbered souls. Hanging above those seats were 28 large overhead bins, plus two smaller ones at the front. Boeing later told me that the large bins are made to hold up to six standard-size carry-on bags each. Six times 28 is 168, so if we assume that each of the smaller bins can hold at least another pair of bags, there would be space enough for every passenger on a full flight to stow something overhead. It seemed my theory was debunked.
Sort of. The large bins, which were of a relatively new, swing-down design that Boeing calls “Space Bins,” must be loaded in a certain way to reach their maximum capacity. That means inserting the bags sideways and upright, so that they slide like books onto a shelf. The bags loaded like books also must conform to expected size. U.S. airline standards limit the dimensions of carry-on bags to 22-by-14-by-9 inches, but (shocker) many people bring on bags that are much larger, or are oddly shaped. Some bring two. If the margin for error in the bins is very small—as appeared to be the case for my flight to Arizona—then how likely is it that every piece of luggage on a full flight will end up stowed away?
The tenuous conditions of my trip to Phoenix turn out to represent something like a best-case scenario. Not every plane is as well-equipped as the aircraft that happened to be flying me that day. Boeing’s Space Bins are optional for airplane buyers, an upgrade over smaller models that are meant to hold just four bags each. An American Airlines spokesperson told me that 80 percent of its mainline fleet has the larger bins; the rest have compartments built for the luggage habits of our forebears.
Even with the larger bins installed, a given plane’s capacity for holding people could still exceed its theoretical space for those people’s suitcases. That’s because Boeing’s bins are stock equipment, a spokesperson told me, while each customer—i.e., each airline—designs its own seats, and specifies the distance between them. That space allowance, called “pitch” in the business, has been contracting over the years so that more seats can be crammed in. Naturally, all of those extra passengers end up sharing the same number (and volume) of overhead bins.
At the same time, travelers have been given new incentives to engage in the aisle scrum for bin space. “Back in the day, we used to buy an airline ticket and many things were included,” Laurie Garrow, a civil-engineering professor at Georgia Institute of Technology who specializes in aviation-travel behavior, told me. “And then, after the 2008 financial crisis, that’s when the de-bundling started.” Under pressure from rising fuel costs, competition from low-cost carriers, and other factors, airlines separated standard perks such as free checked bags into individual services, which travelers could buy or forgo. To dodge those added costs, more people chose to carry on.
Those fees are not the only factor. Southwest Airlines passengers, who can check two bags for free, still seem to fight over limited space in bins. And business travelers, whose ticket class or airline status often comes with free checked bags, still like to store their stuff overhead. That’s because they value their time and don’t want to stand around a baggage carousel. Nor are they willing to accept the hassle of potential mix-ups with checked luggage.
The bags themselves have also changed. Today’s hard-shell cases don’t compress to fit as soft-shell bags do, which may erase whatever latitude remains in a bin-to-passenger ratio that is already way too low. The luxurious Space Bins on my flight to Phoenix just barely seemed to satisfy the airline’s implied promise to its passengers, and I hadn’t bothered to consider other complications. Passengers in bulkhead rows may not have under-seat storage and thus send their personal items up top too. And some bin space might be reserved for defibrillators or other safety equipment. Perhaps this isn’t quite the scam I had initially imagined, but the entire carry-on situation is dangled over a precipice, ready to tumble into the void at any moment.
Precarity of stowage leads to mayhem. The number of carry-ons being carried on has been rising since the great de-bundling, and more passengers are flying too. In the hellscape that results, passengers squeeze past one another as they roam in both directions down the aisles, in an often fruitless search for empty bins. By 2011, boarding times had already doubled compared with the 1970s, and they’ve crept up even further in the past five years. Based on my experience, the gate-lice epidemic is also getting worse.
Solving the carry-on crisis is difficult: The variables are many, and the incentives to change them are in conflict. The global airline industry now makes almost $30 billion a year from baggage fees. With rising fuel costs, increasing salaries for pilots, and the usual Wall Street pressures for quarterly performance, airlines aren’t likely to give up that income anytime soon. And yet, airlines also have an incentive to reduce the time it takes to load and unload planes, because doing so would allow them to turn flights around faster. If passengers had fewer carry-ons, airline schedules could be more efficient.
Boeing has researched and defined the maximum volume that a carry-on bag might reasonably occupy, given current consumer preferences and trends in luggage manufacturing. Teague, the firm that has designed all of Boeing’s aircraft interiors since 1946 (when overhead bins were nothing more than hat racks), incorporates that figure into its holistic vision of an aircraft’s interior: windows, lavatories, galleys, and, yes, overhead bins. Innovations in the latter tend to go in one direction only: “It’s like an arms race between Airbus and Boeing over who has the biggest bins,” David Young, a Teague principal industrial designer who has worked on cabin features for 20 years, told me.
The design process is intricate. Overhead bins must be designed such that they never, ever open accidentally and also so they can be closed with little effort by passengers and flight attendants of various sizes and strengths. The bins must be easy to reach without getting in the way of passengers’ bodies during boarding and deplaning. Young and his colleagues also must ensure that baggage doesn’t shift around so much inside a bin that it falls out when a passenger goes to retrieve it. That task is made more difficult by the slippery, injection-molded plastic luggage that is now in vogue, which has a greater tendency to slide around in-bin.
I was impressed by Young’s account of the attention that goes into every detail of the bins’ design, but the whole affair felt like it might be accelerating the problem—in the way that adding lanes to a freeway can create more traffic than it alleviates. If the cabin designers are always trying to expand overhead bins to accommodate larger and more numerous carry-on bags, then surely passengers will respond by choosing and bringing ever bigger bags.
So what, then—should Boeing shrink the bins just to reverse the trend? Young and Garrow proposed another way: “Just check your bag,” they both suggested, as if this Buddhist avian manner could easily be put into practice. Garrow told me that she’s started packing less and using hotel laundry and dry-cleaning services, just so that her carry-on is smaller. Young said he brings only a bag that fits underneath the seat in front of him.
Fine ideas, I suppose. But the carry-on crisis won’t be solved by asking passengers to behave more sensibly. For the moment, we can’t even seem to figure out how to use the newer, more capacious bins the way we’re meant to. On my flight back home, passengers loaded them haphazardly, with some bags laid flat instead of on their side. As a result, those bins carried four bags at most, not six. When I asked my flight attendant how passengers respond to her instruction to stow each bag “like a book,” she shrugged. “I don’t know; sometimes I stack books flat on my shelves.”
One passenger on my flight expressed her perplexity aloud: “Like a book?” She sounded confused but also, in a way, concerned—as if her suitcase might not feel so comfortable on its side. I found this endearing. Roller bags are a little bit like pets, skittering across the floor, low to the ground, always by our side. Maybe people like to bring their bag on board because they want to have it close, as if the suitcase were a friend with whom they might share the loneliness of travel.
When I floated this idea to Young, he worried that I might be flying too much, and brought me back to earth with a much more practical concern. Overhead-bin design has reached its limit, he said; the cabin luggage compartments won’t be getting any bigger: “I’d say we’re at a breaking point. We’ve hit as big as we can go.” That means some other solution to the carry-on crisis must be found. Some other, far more radical solution.
“Maybe we don’t need carry-ons at all,” Young went on. He was whispering, almost, as if his secret made him sound bananas, which it somewhat did. “Someone needs to step out and say, ‘We’re not doing this anymore. This isn’t the right experience for air travel.’” What if the overhead were instead restored to its original purpose, as a modest rack for hats, coats, shoulder bags, and briefcases? Already planning for this possible, if still unthinkable, future, Teague has started designing all of its interiors to include an option without any overhead bins at all. Imagine how light you’d feel up at cruising altitude with no bags encumbering you, and a stretch of empty space above your head.
“But where would the bags go?” I asked, not yet ready to loosen the grip on my Rollaboard. Maybe you’d drop them off early, at the AirTrain station, he explained, or later at the gate. Or maybe you’d board the plane with them, as you always have, but then you could lower them down into the hold from the cabin floor. Who knows? Young’s point is: Nobody has even tried to imagine an alternative. Travelers ought to dream of a future without carry-on luggage, rather than one that expands endlessly to contain it.