Hey, Wide Load, You’re Tilting the Plane!
REVOLUTION, I SAY! It’s time to stuff the profit-swollen airline swine back down into the deep dark corporate pit where they belong! Time to put the genie back in the bottle and cork it forever!
Listen.
Over the years I’ve flown quite a few times. Many times, in fact. I’ve flown all over the United States and I’ve flown internationally. As of this writing I’ve flown to, I think, 23 countries, plus any number of times internally in several of those countries. The most harrowing of all those internal flights was in 1986 on an Air India jet from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. We’d only been in the air for about an hour and weren’t terribly high above the mountains when there was a sudden boom! and a great shuddering of the entire plane. For half a minute the cabin rocked and vibrated to the sound of grinding gears. It scared the hell out of me, but none of the flight crew seemed particularly alarmed— maybe that sort of thing was a common occurrence for Air India, I don’t know —but the unsettling assumption among the passengers was that we had blown one of the four engines.
So, with the exception of that incident over the lush and verdant jungles of east Rwanda, and the occasional floppy-winged turbulence of a 757 or Airbus 320 skirting the edges of a lightning-dazzled 60,000 foot thundercloud, or the infrequent but none the less attention-grabbing aborted landing when the pilot suddenly pushed the engines forward to full throttle just as our landing gears were about to burn rubber on the concrete because another jet was sitting on the runway in front of us, and okay, yes, the once-in-a-while out of control passenger creating chaos in mid-flight, or the even less-than-once-in-a-while last minute diversion from one airport to another because of fog or lightning or because the first airport has shut down its runways due to some undisclosed emergency, my flying experiences have been almost universally routine. Ho hum. Well, all right, there was that time when our flight had to land unexpectedly at an airport other than our destination because, as the pilot calmly but seriously announced, we were “running out of gas.”
I’m not sure how or when I missed it— I thought I flew often enough and was paying closer attention —but sometime in the last five or ten years it seems the airlines stopped allowing free carry-on luggage. You know what I’m referring to. Those hard shell compact suitcases with extendable handles and little wheels that practically everyone owns these days because,, like you and me, they don’t want to pay the extra fee for checking their luggage, let alone risk having the airline lose it. Time was, not so long ago, you could check a bag for free, as long as it was under 50 pounds. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the restrictions. On Spirit, the airline I travel on the most because I’m cheap, the luggage policy reads as follows:
“You can check one standard-sized bag for free if you have
Free Spirit Gold status. Otherwise, Spirit charges a fee for all
carry-on and checked luggage, except for a free personal item.”
After this you pay anywhere from $41 to $100 per bag just for bringing your luggage aboard an aircraft that’s designed to carry many thousands of pounds more than all the passengers, crew, and cargo combined could ever weigh. For the record, American, Delta, and most other domestic carriers have the same carry-on restrictions: 1 carry-on and 1 small personal item. Size limits are fairly universal: 22 x 14 x 9 inches. To ensure that passengers are complying with these size requirements there are what they call “sizers” at every gate in every airport now. If your pack fits, you can rest assured it will fit in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of you. Your feet won’t have anywhere to go, but by God, your pack will ride comfortably! Not sure if your carry-on passes muster? Place it in the sizer. If it fits, you’re good to go. A little too tall or wide? Sorry, but you’re going to have to cough up $40 or more just to take it on board and stuff it in the overhead bin. If you can cheat the sizer, you cheat.
In my case, I have a collapsable Rick Steves travel bag that, left open and floppy, is definitely too long for unpaid carry-on. But because I can wear it like a backpack and can mold it into the required dimensions of the sizer, I’ve always been able to cheat the already rigged system.
But get this: On on a recent domestic trip from Baltimore to Dallas/Fort Worth— on Spirit, naturally —I was standing in line waiting for my “Zone” to be called when a Spirit employee walked up to me and instructed me to place my “backpack” in the sizer. I wasn’t the only passenger he was checking, but I was taken by surprise just the same. This was a first. I mean, when had the baggage police ever stood by conducting a carry-on check? I was a little concerned at first that I was about to be nicked for a carry-on surcharge, but as I hoped I could, I was able to squash my bag down into the sizer and barely met the requirement. “Okay,” he said with a nod, and I got back in line. I walked over to the other side of the line this time, though. I didn’t want to give him the chance to change his mind. But then another baggage checker on that side of the queue pulled me out of line and instructed me to place my bag in the sizer.
“I just did this,” I protested.
“Well, I didn’t see you,” she said.
“I don’t care whether you saw me or not,” I said, raising my voice. “I’m not doing it again!”
“Sir— ”
“Look,” I said, pointing to the attendant across from us, “that guy checked my bag, it passed, and I’m not going to do it again. Do you understand?”
“Which guy? Who checked your bag?” The idiot. There was only one other Spirit employee standing across from us. “Him!” I growled.
“Carlos!” she called so that the whole gate could hear, “did you check this man’s bag?”
Carlos gave her the thumbs up and said, “He’s good.”
At that I looked at her smugly and got back in line.
Yeah, yeah. I hear you. They were just doing their job. Whatever. But whether my bag fit or not— whether anybody’s carry-on fit or not —we weren’t dealing with a potential cargo weight limit or a load distribution issue that was going to make a difference in the aircraft’s functioning or aerodynamics. Physics were not the enemy. If every passenger on that flight— and it was a full flight of 180 passengers and 7 crew —had had a carry on that was slightly too large and, say, five pounds overweight, the extra weight would have amounted to a cowbird standing lookout on a longhorn’s ass. The airline has its rules and regulations, I get it. Don’t like the rules? Drive. Take Amtrak. Hitchhike. The point is the airlines want to maximize their profits while minimizing their costs. Sure. That’s capitalism for you.
But here’s where the weight, size, and cost-cutting measures break down. The airlines will measure the bags for size and weight, but what about the passengers?
I went on board and found my seat, 17 D. Aisle. I had no sooner sat down and adjusted my seatbelt than my row mates appeared and claimed their seats next to me. Both of them were women, both of them grossly overweight. The one in the middle, the one directly beside me, took up her entire seat, all of the armrest between us, plus a quarter of my seat space. I spent the entire flight listing toward the aisle at a 20º angle. It was when I was more or less forced to look down the aisle that I got my first good look at the number of humongous individuals who were taking up more than their fair share of seating space. These were people whose fat was spilling over into the seat next to them or out into the aisle. Fat, fat, fat! Fat everywhere! Butterball! Medicine ball! Spy balloons! It was unbelievable!
That’s when it hit me. Why is the airline so concerned with my little 22 x 14 x 9 inch bag and whether or not it will fit in a luggage measurer the size of a small Igloo cooler when they’ve got walrus-sized humans aboard who couldn’t shoehorn their way into a normal sized airplane seat with a quart of grease and a crowbar?
It’s disgraceful, the physical non-condition these elephants allow themselves to get into in the first place. But the airlines are just as guilty. They continue to shrink the size of the seats and show careless disregard for the comfort and safety of the majority of their passengers by allowing these wide loads to invade everyone else’s space (and wallets) simply because they don’t want to offend these lazy food vacuums. Look, Spirit— Delta, Continental, American, and all the rest of you fly birds —if you’re going to charge exorbitant fees for baggage that doesn’t conform to your arbitrary and standard sizers, you need to charge passengers who don’t fit the standard-sized airplane seat and make them pay by the pound or check them through with the cargo pallets and oversized luggage in the hold. Better yet, for the safety and peace of mind for the rest of us, how about you don’t let them fly in the first place? Have TSA stop them before they ever pass through the security checkpoint. Clearly, they’re as much a threat to the welfare of the aircraft and passengers as a high pressure canister of propane and a lithium battery.
We’d like to take off and land safely.
