You’ve never heard of yield management in use on trains and ships?
A friend of mine told me that on one of his Las Vegas trips he was pretty sure his bag was over the limit on the return trip. He always uses the curbside check-in, and as the skycap was putting his suitcase on the scale he made a point of having a larger than usual tip folded in his hand where the skycap could see it. Amazingly enough, although his bag was over the limit he wasn’t charged an excess weight fee.
Well, yeah, I have had gate crew gals who didn’t want to be jerks over a couple of pounds, and weren’t sure if their scale was 100% correct, so they probably have a “speed limit” of 5 lbs over or something.
Actually, now that I think about it, the airport scale almost always weighs lighter than my scale at home.
To take this advice to heart…
What does “CPAP” mean?
CPAP Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. Essentially a machine that pushes air into your nose to keep the airway open while you sleep; one of the causes of sleep apnea is that the muscles which normally hold the airway open relax too much while you sleep, cutting off your oxygen supply. This keeps you from getting a restful night’s sleep; before I was diagnosed I was prone to dozing off at my desk in the afternoon and was always tired. I also snored like a buzzsaw.
It’s a gizmo that people who have sleep apnea wear while they sleep.
ETA: I see LurkMeister was both quicker and more complete in his explanation.
I’ve always had to gate check my stroller - you couldn’t pay me to try and navigate it on the plane. I’ve never seen a stroller carried on a plane before.
As far as size limitations, I’m more than agreeable with this. I took a work trip a few weeks ago, which was just an overnight thing. I had a rolling laptop bag, and a purse. Both were small enough to fit under the seat in front of me.
Boarding one of the planes, the flight attendant tried to tell me that I had to completely CHECK my laptop bag and it would meet me at baggage claim at my final destination because there was no room left in the overhead compartments. I refused because there was nowhere to put my laptop, and I wasn’t about to let it go through the baggage claim - I fit it under the seat in front of me, and the guy next to me was nice enough to let my purse hang over into his area a little bit. Meanwhile, I had seen people boarding with giant roll-on suitcases. Perhaps if they’d actually ENFORCED the size limitations on those stupid things, there would have been room for everyone with the proper-sized carry-on to bring theirs on-board.
Thanks LurkMeister and RTFirefly. Ignorance fought.
To add an opinion in this thread, it will make me very sad & angry if I have to pay extra in the future to get my beloved window seat. No more meals? I can handle it (I never understood why they served meals on domestic flights anyway). No more snacks even? I can handle it (peanuts & pretzels? Ugh). Pay extra for checking a 2nd bag? I can handle it (I never ever have a 2nd bag needing to be checked). Extra security, 3oz bottles of liquidy stuff, having to take shoes off, X-ray and all that jazz? I can handle it. No liquids? Tough because I take a bottle of filtered water with me everywhere, but I guess I can handle it.
But take away/make me pay extra for my window seat? That’s a deal-breaker. I’d rather pay more to another airline that doesn’t charge for a window seat than pay less including the window seat charge to the airline that charges for a window seat, which doesn’t make sense, but it’s the principle of the thing (which won’t do me any good if they ALL start charging). Bastards.
Nearly all the planes I’ve been on for interstate travel in the past few years has been in midsize planes, mostly Airbuses. In all of them, there’s been exactly 5 seats to a row: window, middle, aisle seat, the aisle, aisle seat, window. There literally are more window and aisle seats than there are middle seats. I can’t imagine they’d charge extra in those cases.
On at least two occasions I have seen people trying to cram roller carts into the overhead that did not fit because the outside pockets were stretched to the limit. In neither case were they told that they would have to check them. Instead, they were allowed to stand in the aisle holding up everyone else while they took stuff out of the pockets until it fit. I also once heard someone complain to no one in particular about a laptop case (which I knew was mine) being in the overhead and making it impossible to fit their megabags in it. I refrained from pointing out that my larger CPAP bag was under the seat in order to leave more room in the overhead, since I had enough leg room to accomodate it.
I don’t know whose Scarebusses you are flying on but every narrow body I have been on for years with the exception of regional jets and DC-9/Md80/81 etc have 6 seats per row. window, middle, aisle, aisle, middle, window. This would include Scarebus A319, A320, A321, B737, B727, B757
Regional jets have 4 per row, no middles.
Only the DC-9/Md jets have 5 per row in my experience.
Cute name aside, you’re right. I’m using a 319 tomorrow and it has 6 seats per row. I don’t have any easily accessible information on the last flights I’ve taken, so I can’t say anything about them other than I know there’s usually only 5 per.
Are any Fokkers still in use in America? I seem to remember KLM’s having a 3+2 arrangement.
All I can tell you is that in 16 years of fairly heavy business travel on United, Air Canada, Continental, American, Delta, US Air, Alaska and Southwest I have never seen a 3+2 on a Boeing or Airbus narrow body.
Airbus, use the rudder have the tail fall off = Scarebus. Oh well at least the front didn’t fall off. 
Well, at least I know the puddle hoppers I usually take from Billings to Denver won’t charge extra for aisle and window seats. Every seat on the plane is aisle or window (2+2 arrangement).
I certainly hope a lawsuit is filed if they try to charge extra for aisle seats. On smaller planes the curvature of the side of the plane pushes my shoulder into the next seat if I sit in a window, which makes me and the person next to me unhappy. I’m a fairly big guy (6’4" with pretty broad shoulders), but I’ve met a lot of people even bigger. And the aisle seats and exit rows (and bulkheads on some planes) are the only ones where I have room for my legs without pressing my knees into the back of the guy in front of me.
I keep thinking they can’t make the damned seats any narrower or closer together, and then they do it.
Well, it ain’t perfect, but air travel in the US is a little bigger show than in Australia. Southwest carries more domestic people in a day than Quantas does in a week.
My father’s flown fairly often for business both before and after the new TSA idiocy. He says that if you’re nice and apologetic to the gate agent, some airlines will waive a second bag/overweight bag fee. These are inevitably the airlines that actually enforce the carry-on size/weight limit at the gate and send people to the back of the line to CHECK their giant bags before letting them on the plane. It may help that my father is not rude to the agent, has the same general dopey, congenial Irish sheepdog look as Sam Waterston or Harrison Ford, and is roughly the same size as a full-grown Wookiee.
Or they could just start enforcing policy across the board. A friend of mine recently spent some months in Japan. She says that if you attempted to bring a large or extra bag on the flight the gate agents in Narita would just stand there being endlessly polite to you until you shipped the bag some other way, or missed your flight altogether.
On the other hand, I would be entirely in favor of a $900/bag fee being charged to people like an ex-roommate of mine, who flew home from the US at the end of the semester to stay with her parents in Ireland. I stared at her collection of FOUR huge suitcases in the living room, containing everything in her wardrobe and most of her bed linens, for a while before I asked her how she intended to get those on the airplane. “I don’t know,” she said. “Last time I just cried and they let me on.”
What really tweaks me is that it makes it next to impossible to compare fares for a flight.
But, to be honest, you’ve got it easy, on some airlines in the UK you’ll end up paying extra for any or all of the following:
[ul]
[li] Ability to pick a seat[/li][li] Ability to check-in on-line[/li][li] Ability to board first (on flights without pre-allocated seating)[/li][li] Ability to pay with a card that’s not the airlines own branded card[/li][li] Every item of checked baggage [/li][li] Extra if any of your items are overweight[/li][li] Food, drink (not just alcohol) on the plane[/li][/ul]
It’s just a matter of what can they legally get away with charging for next, if they could weigh a person I’ve no doubt they would.
The advantage is that it does make the base fare cheap, so if I forgo the luxuries and pack just a carry on bag then I can fly to Europe for somewhere between £20 and £50 one-way.
Of course there are other non-budget airlines serving the same routes so I have a choice and I can pay four times as much and all the above and free booze.
There’s always been levels of service in air travel, and airlines are all running as tight as they can – it’s a competitive business. To be honest asking for a few quid to check a second bag doesn’t really seem that bad to me.
SD
Nah, not really. Just install scales under three-by-three foot plates at the check-in and connect them to the system. You go to the check-in, get weighted automatically (“please step inside and place your carry-on luggage inside red square” added to “place your luggage on conveyor belt”), get weight printed on the boarding card and have extra fee calculated instantly. Or you score extra frequent-flyer miles for weight under limit. There are scales for weighting luggage, it’s not engineering problem to add second one for weighting people. And all dirty work is done by computers these days anyway.
I actually think that it would be quite good and just system, but probably too un-PC to apply in real world.
Heinlein had that in one of his stories - people had to pay a fee for spaceflight based on a weigh-in.