Dialogue: Locker-hoggers a safety threat

You know that request our nice Air New Zealand flight attendants make each time your plane touches down in Auckland, or Wellington, or Hokitika? "Ladies and gentlemen, for your own comfort and safety, please remain seated until ... "

Aha, but now we know that remaining seated on aircraft isn't all that conducive to comfort and safety. Merely booking an economy-class seat seems enough to bring blood clots swarming from every corner of the circulatory system.

Airlines warned us about it long before economy-class syndrome became a fashionable affliction.

The advice given in videos at the start of international flights was usually to pull your knees up towards your chin occasionally.

Actually, the distance between rows in cattle class means you sit with knees permanently up to your chin.

Plus you often cannot stretch your legs out under the seat in front - its occupant has stuffed two of his five pieces of cabin luggage there.

And that raises an even more blood-curdling problem than economy-class syndrome, or deep-vein thrombosis. Why do our airlines allow passengers to selfishly, blatantly ignore the regulations for cabin luggage, thus eroding the comfort and safety of other passengers?

The signs announcing you are allowed only one cabin item of such-and-such a size are prominent enough at check-in counters. So are the little frames showing the size of that item.

I saw one of those frames at an Auckland boarding gate recently. A passenger was resting two of her cabin bags on it while she rearranged the other two.

It is a rare airline that makes any attempt to enforce cabin luggage limits. About the only time I've seen it done, with staff politely asking if people would mind items three, four and five being stowed in the hold, the shock of those passengers was palpable. Someone was actually challenging their divine right to exceed the allowance.

Multiple-cabin-bag passengers are responsible for one of flying's less pleasant features - that press of people all wanting to get on the aircraft first to grab more than their share of locker space.

Why do people carry so much cabin luggage?

I understand the anxiety that you may get off in Auckland, New Zealand, while your bags get off in Oakland, California. I understand extra bags for people travelling with a baby.

But it seems that for many offenders, their baby is their luggage.

I resent some excess cabin bags more than others - square-edged briefcases with mock-gold corners like martial arts weapons, backpacks with straps that tangle round everyone else's bags, floppy sports bags that won't sit upright anywhere.

That one time I saw an airline actually enforce cabin luggage restrictions, there was a security guard in attendance. Passenger reactions explained why.

The guard's presence was doubly appropriate. Those excess bags are a safety threat.

It is not just the way their owners keep trampling on you while they get down their sports bag and replace it with their backpack. It is also the way the bags jammed under seats so often shift and sag into the aisles.

They are a security as well as a comfort hazard. Imagine trying to wrench your lifejacket past a lethal-edged briefcase.

Plus there is the way those owners' other bags are crammed into overhead lockers. If you do strike what airlines euphemistically call the unlikely event of an emergency, the lockers are going to be like loaded slingshots.

The fine print on tickets gives airlines the right to refuse all sorts of things, from firearms to drunks. I hope that some time soon they will summon up the courage to refuse grossly excess cabin luggage.

I am, of course, the most tolerant of human beings, but I would love a policy of zero tolerance towards all locker-hoggers.

Either that or the next time I wait in the aisle of Flight NZ234 ex-Auckland while someone jams four bags into their own and others' spaces, I may develop a blood clot before I even sit down.

* David Hill is a New Plymouth writer.