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US Airlines Say Smaller Carry-Ons Are Not In the Cards
New submitter callgen writes: Airlines for America, a trade group for U.S. carriers, has rejected proposed international standards for carry-on bags. Last week, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced an initiative to "optimize" airlines' accommodation of carry-on bags by suggesting a new standard luggage size. It suggested a standard of 55cm x 35cm x 19cm, 58% of the size that Southwest allows. Most standard carry-ons are larger than IATA's recommendations, meaning travelers would have to purchase new luggage if the smaller size was adopted.
Can they also regulated the size and weight of the passenger for that price?
The cost of flying a plane increases with weight.
Thing is, while I do agree that a standard unit that allows for easy conversion has its advantages, the Metric System's units do not correlate well to real-world situations. 0 degrees Fahrenheit through 100 degrees Fahrenheit correspond well with the temperature range at which a human can work outdoors without resorting to special equipment. A foot, as it is similar to the anatomical part of the same name, is sized conveniently to work with in the physical world with things that the average person will interact with in arms-reach. A gallon of water is about at the limit of what most people can pour and handle in drinkable liquid.
As someone who grew up within the Metric system, I have the same issues with the imperial units. I find them completely unintuitive and out of my normal experience. What good is a foot as a unit? There is barely anything that is a foot long, except a foot. But the working space on my desk is 1 meter wide. The distance from my desk to the wall behind me has to be at least 1 meter to allow me to sit behind my desk. The length of my legs from the hips down is about 1 meter. What good is Fahrenheit either? When my thermometer shows 0 Celsius, I know I have to drive carefully, as the roads might be frozen. Much easier to remember than 32 F. 20 Celsius is a nice spring day, 25 Celsius means I don't need a jacket, and 30 Celsius means it's getting hot outside. Nice, round numbers. But 68 F, 77 F and 86 F? Horrible! 1 Liter of any drinkable liquid weighs 1 kilogram. That's easy. How much pounds is that? And why the difference between liquid ounces and weigh ounces? Catastrophic! 1 km is the distance I walk within 10 minutes. Easy. A mile? Something about 16 minutes. 100 km is the distance I drive within one hour on the Autobahn, even including heavy traffic. Easy. 100 miles? Yeah, one and a half hour, maybe a little more. How inconvient!
Metric works well with my experience. Metric works for me. Imperial units do not.
See how it boils down to whatever you grew up with? Imperial units are in no way more or less intuitive than metric ones. You just remember the real world examples that fit within the imperial units. I remember the real world examples that work well with metric units. None of them is more natural than the other one.
I would never ever check in my camera gear. That is simply to much risk and the insurance doesn't cover it - you would need to buy a special insurance for that and that would probably be very expensive since bags are frequently lost or even stolen.
I worked on the ramp for several years in one of the busiest airports in the US, and if you pack a camera in a good-sized pelican case you won't have any issues. For one thing I have never seen one break or get damaged. But the main reason is this: honestly, pelican cases never get thrown because the person stacking the bin (or the one passing the bags to him if it's a long bin and they have enough gate crew members) usually sits on one. If you want to go cheap and don't really have anything too fragile, one of the guys I worked with said he always used a large rolling cooler for his luggage (strong, watertight, plus then you have a cooler when you get to your destination). When you have to stack 100-150 bags in a 757 in the middle of summer, there's nothing like the simple joy of getting a good pelican case to sit on and a working bin carpet.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It's good to hear your perspective and see that our perceptions about the intuitiveness of our measurement systems is relative. I've always thought that the larger scale of Fahrenheit was convenient because units of 10 distinguished temperatures well (70's are distinct from 80's), but it's clear that you use units of 5 in Celsius for the same purpose.
Of course I admit that my reluctance to change to metric has more to do with American nationalism than with any sure superiority of our units (although I despise using centimeters for small around-the-house measurements when inches and 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 inches feel better to me). But at the same time, I think that it is as necessary to have multiple measurement systems as it is to have multiple languages. In the 20th c. especially many people believed that the era of different tongues was coming to an end, but I think that despite the prevalence of English and Chinese around the world, there will always be multiple languages because culture can never be simplified into a single thing. Even in the USA it's possible to go to another region where they use some different words, different phrasings, different ways of thinking, and this is simply a natural occurrence akin to genetic diversity. The more distinct a culture, the more distinct its use of a language, so native English speakers in India do not speak exactly the same English as in the USA or UK. An absolute universal language can never be anything but an artificial construct disconnected from real culture, hence the problem with Esperanto. (And I do recognize that there are some native Esperanto speakers, but that does not remove its failure as a universal, a-cultural language.)
In the end, the U.S. uses the metric system when it's helpful (e.g. in science), and there is no pressing need to switch to it completely. Just because we use the US system doesn't mean that we don't understand the metric system and aren't taught it in schools.
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