There’s a certain level of zen that comes with boarding an airplane.
The free-for-all may be stressful, but the chaos is also predictable.
If they’re right and they make it past the gate agent, all’s well that ends well.
It’s not people finding their seats."
Given how recurrent this problem is, it seems like someone should have fixed it by now.
But instead, the handling of carry-on luggage has become an inevitable pain point in flying.
Passengers have to take a “Jesus take the roller-bag wheels” approach to the situation.
A lot of people are flying nowadays.
Planes are more crowded, too.
Some of the increase is a result of bigger planes, but they’re more packed, too.
Engel said the American Airlines Boeing 737-800, for example, had 148 total seats upon delivery in 2000.
By 2013, that number was 160.
In 2024, it was 172.
So more seats and a higher percentage occupied definitely means more people."
More people on a plane translates to more money for carriers.
It reduces their cost per available seat mile, increasing efficiency and profitability.
“The average aircraft density is up substantially,” Engel said.
All these passengers, of course, aren’t flying empty-handed.
They’ve got luggage, and a lot of them are trying to bring that luggage on board.
The carry-on-bag problem is partly related to space and partly to economics.
(You pack more for vacation than you do for a one-day business meeting.)
It was followed quickly by United Airlines.
The move was followed by a proliferation offees across the airline industry.
Today, charges for checking bags and choosing seats are among the largest ancillary revenue generators for airlines.
They make billions of dollars fromchecked-bag feeseach year.
Beyond that, there are other reasons people aren’t so jazzed about the idea of checking their bags.
“The more bags you handle, the more bags you lose.
That’s just math,” Mann said.
What this all adds up to is a persistent crisis at the gate.
Smaller planes especially don’t have enough space for everyone to store their bags in the overhead bins.
“Gate agents aren’t checking in with crew in real time over when bin space is actually full.
And even if they did, that wouldn’t give them the information they need,” Leff said.
So gate agents require it long before overhead bins actually fill up."
To passengers, this can seem unfair and arbitrary.
Generally, when European airlines tell you how much your carry-on can weigh, they mean it.
These tweaks won’t address the aforementioned bin hogs, though.
Airlines could do more to get passengers to check their bags.
Other airlines could follow suit, though they may not be eager to give up that baggage-fee cash cow.
Engel told me he packs light and gets on early.
Leff employs a similar strategy, though he admitted that on one occasion he cheated the system.
He complied with the tagging, but he took the bag on the plane anyway.
The gate agent almost always says yes, and I get to skip the checked-bag fee.
“Not always, it’s not guaranteed, but sometimes,” he said.
It seems that the battle of the bags is here to stay.
Emily Stewartis a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
