It's That Time of Year Again

The Third-Annual Happy Wanderer Air Travel Post

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Speed (1994), for probably the twentieth time. Why do I love this movie so much (besides Keanu Reeves, obviously)? Well, one eccentric reason appears in the picture below:

I found this image here.

Notice how the passengers are staying in their seats calmly and patiently, instead of rushing to the front, freaking out, trying to elbow each other out of the way, or otherwise seizing an advantage for themselves at others’ expense. Yes, a panicked lady falls out of the bus, and a young guy pulls a gun before being subdued, but the rest of the passengers are helpful and cooperative in a terrifying situation. The driver is shot, and some older ladies care for and comfort him. Keanu Reeves tells everyone to go to one side of the bus, and they go. He tells them to hang on, and they hang on. The rescue truck arrives, and the passengers file off in an orderly fashion, not pushing and shoving but helping each other—even Alan Ruck, who had been so annoying earlier in the movie.¹ The strongest passenger, Ortiz, goes last so he can assist everyone else off the bus.

Which got me thinking, as is my wont, about air travel.

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Carry-On Bags and Moral Injury

You’d think that if the (admittedly fictional) people in Speed are able to behave in such an exemplary manner, the rest of us could manage it too, on our flights that are thankfully unplagued by mad bombers. But no. I am a frequent flyer, and all of my US flights in recent years have been delayed for a frustrating and avoidable reason: Everyone is attempting to stow too many giant carry-on bags into too little overhead compartment space. While most situations are not zero-sum, overhead compartments are the exception; they are pie, not potluck, and there will be winners and losers. This zero-sum situation causes us to be selfish and grumpy with each other and to behave in ways that are beneath us—crowding forward, cutting in line, breaking the rules, and, worst of all, making gate agents’ and flight attendants’ jobs more difficult:

This is a screenshot of a post on Substack Notes.

The best way to win in this zero-sum situation is to opt out altogether by checking our bags. Or, if we absolutely must take carry-on, we ought to strive to be considerate of others. As a commenter on last year’s air travel post says, “If everyone just did SOMETHING to minimise their footprint (pack lighter, check bags, know the rules), it would be an improvement.”

Two Mental Glitches

I get why people avoid checking their bags, I really do. For one thing, as I have argued before, the airlines have their incentives exactly backward. They charge for checked luggage, when if they were to charge for carry-ons and make checked luggage free, far more people would choose to check their bags, and those who insisted on carry-on would have to pay for access to scarce bin space. For another, we fear that the airlines will lose our luggage, or that if we have a tight connection, our bags won’t make it onto our second flight.

But these are spurious fears that reveal a glitch in our thinking: We tend to fear rare catastrophes and to ignore ordinary problems. In fact the chance that anything whatsoever will happen to our checked bags is minuscule—about one-half of one percent—and if it does, the airlines are required to put the bags on the next flight and then bring them to us, or to compensate us if they’re lost.² Our mental glitch causes us to avoid the tiny risk of lost bags at the cost of long lines at security, delayed flights, and slow boarding and deplaning caused by too many carry-ons.

To introduce our second glitch, I need a quick digression. Our dog, Lynn, was a stray before we adopted her, and as a result she has perhaps the most overdeveloped amygdala in the animal kingdom. One day on a walk, she darted away from something in utter panic. We investigated, and the scary object turned out to be a partially deflated Mylar Spider-Man balloon.

My husband protecting Lynn from the terrifying balloon.

For weeks after the balloon was gone, every time we walked past that spot, our vigilant dog would peer nervously through the hedge to ensure that the Spider-Man balloon was no longer menacing the neighborhood.

We flawed humans resemble Lynn more than we might care to admit. Our fears often persist after circumstances have changed and the danger is over. We’ve seen this phenomenon with Covid, where even with vaccines and the milder Omicron variant, some people seem emotionally stuck in the summer of 2020.³ We can be especially slow to adapt to advances in technology. Although passengers may not have fully internalized this fact, technology has vastly improved the system for checked bags. Gone are the days of imperfectly scribbled and mislabeled tags. Bags are now assigned bar codes that are scanned by machines. Our luggage rockets around the bowels of the airport on an intricate system of conveyor belts rather than being pawed through and lugged around by baggage handlers.⁴ Watch and be amazed:

Yes, in days of yore it was all too common for bags to be lost or delayed, but our current system is safe and accurate. And even when things do go wrong, it’s not the disaster it used to be, again thanks to technology. The airlines know exactly where our bag is and will send us regular, reassuring updates on its progress. A couple of years ago, my bag was left behind in Newark, and when I turned on my phone after the plane landed in Zurich, I discovered that the app had already messaged me to say that my bag was on a later flight and would be driven to my home later that day. And indeed it was.

So checked bags are less risky. And at the same time, carry-on has become more of a hassle. As anyone who has flown in recent years can attest, planes hold what seems like twice as many passengers as they used to. We’re crammed into narrow seats, and it is now usual for even the middle seats to be occupied. But the overhead compartments haven’t grown to accommodate the additional bags; worse, what has grown is the size of the carry-ons. It is illustrative to compare our current situation with vintage photos of air travel, which show passengers carrying briefcases, purses, and the occasional hatbox, but not dragging huge wheelie bags (because they hadn’t been invented yet).

“Here is NBC News’ Foreign Correspondent James Robinson in 1958, looking very dapper”—and also carrying only a small briefcase. The source for this image and quote is this fun article about vintage air travel.

Packing Tips and a Pep Talk

All of this being said, I am aware that many of us will never feel comfortable checking luggage, whether because of baggage fees, unfounded fears, bad experiences, tight connections, smuggled diamonds in our suitcase’s lining, or what have you. So I’ll close with a few tips, as well as a pep talk to encourage us to pack light enough that we can get away with a single bag that will fit under the seat in front of us. I know that it can be done, because a few years ago, when I took my son college-tripping, we managed with a single duffel:

Two people, five days, one bag.

Speak softly and carry a big purse. We need not expose ourselves to Tom Wambsgans’s mockery for carrying a “ludicrously capacious bag.” But our purse, backpack, or messenger bag should be large enough to accommodate our medications, valuable jewelry, and maybe a Kindle or a paperback to while away the time during the inevitable delays. And then since we’ve kept irreplaceable items with us in our purse or backpack, we can blithely circumvent baggage fees by gate-checking our carry-on.

Wear your bulk. I always wear jeans, a light cardigan, and sneakers or hiking shoes onto the plane so they don’t take up space in the suitcase. Whatever our bigger items are—hoodies, sport coats, cowboy boots, puffy jackets—we tote them more efficiently on our bodies than in our bags. Plus, when we wear layers, we are prepared for the arctic air conditioning mid-flight.

Occupatio. I won’t waste everyone’s time listing packing tips we can easily find online—for example, to choose a single color palette so that we can mix-and-match our clothes, and to roll shirts to avoid creases, stuff balled-up socks into shoes (or bra cups), jam underwear into nooks and crannies, sort jewelry in a pill organizer, put toiletries in travel containers, use packing cubes to compress and organize outfits, and so on.

Take less. Now for the pep talk. It’s tempting to take more rather than less—three pairs of shoes and purses to match, an extra outfit or two, a suite of high-end skincare products—just in case. God forbid anyone should catch us looking like a regular person instead of Anna Wintour or—the horror!—repeating an item of clothing. So I will say this as gently as possible: No one is keeping a spreadsheet on our outfits in order to ridicule us for wearing something twice. (And if they are, why would we care about the opinion of those weirdos?) The liberating truth is that people pay much less attention to us than we think.

Our friends will thank us for bringing fresh socks and underwear for each day, but we can cut back on everything else. On the rare occasions that I take carry-on, I pack one pair of pants and/or shorts, three or four shirts, the aforementioned socks and underwear, at most one pair of flat sandals, pajamas, an umbrella (because I am superstitious and believe that taking an umbrella will ward off rain), and a small toiletry kit.⁵ That’s all anyone needs for trips of up to a week. My husband is even more impressive. He gets by with just a backpack for three-day business trips.

This minimalist approach has many advantages. We are weighed down by neither our bags nor the choice of what to wear each day. We can relax at the airport and stroll onto the plane just before the door closes, free of the need to hover, queue, jostle, and struggle for an overhead compartment. And we can be proud that our small bag is making life easier for workers and our fellow passengers.

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How about you, readers? Have I persuaded you to check your bags, or at least to pack light so you don’t need to schlep a ginormous suitcase onto the plane? What are your best tips for minimizing your footprint when you fly? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

This week’s tidbit (h/t my daughter) is not only a lot of fun but also teaches us about German compound words. The following tongue-twisting song has become a huge hit on TikTok:

And here is an informative article with an explanation of how there could actually be such a word as [takes deep breath]

Rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel.

1. Poor Alan Ruck. Whether he is Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Connor in Succession, or Stephens in Speed, he seems always fated to play the irritating third-wheel.

2. Even this half-percent chance greatly overstates the risk of what most of us are actually afraid of, irretrievably lost bags. This half-percent figure comprises all cases of mishandling, including not only lost bags but also damage to luggage, delayed bags, and stolen items. In addition, the figure comes from survey responses rather than from complaints to the airline, suggesting that many of these incidents were so minor that passengers decided not to bother making an official claim.

3. Case in point, a mom commented on a New York Times article that she has been homeschooling her teenage daughter, even though her daughter wants to attend regular school, because “Covid is still a threat.” In March 2024. Dispiritingly, this comment is both a top Reader Pick, with 378 recommendations, and an NYT Pick.

4. Another digression: I enjoy Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti mysteries, which are set in Venice. A running joke in the first several books is that Brunetti is perennially investigating the baggage handlers at Marco Polo airport because they steal from bags. But thanks to modern technology, the nefarious Venetian baggage handlers can’t get at the bags anymore, thefts are no longer a problem, and, accordingly, in the newest books Brunetti is able to focus on his other cases.

5. It’s only fair to note that I have the sweat glands of a Victorian maiden and can get away with wearing shirts a few times between washes. You may need either an additional shirt or access to laundry facilities.