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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.
If too much carry on luggage is a problem, then stop charging for checking a bag. When everyone got a checked back for free, there was plenty of overhead storage space, not to mention loading and unloading passengers was a lot faster because people weren't blocking the isles dealing with their carry ons. Now everyone tries to carry on as much as they can so they don't have to pay.
Smaller carry-ons would reduce their utility for many people, resulting in more mandatory checked back and more mandatory checked bag fees. The flight attendants would like it because there would be less boarding chaos with morons who fuck up the overhead bins. And the luggage industry would have a field day.
Really, if you stop and think about this it's a miracle they're not backing it, because if they did everybody but the consumer makes money off the deal.
Centimetres, a metric measure. The entire world (not just Europe) with the exception of Liberia, Myanmar and USA use it. I'm sure you must be proud to be part of the only 1st world nation still using the deprecated imperial measurements.
Just enforce the fucking current rules.
I've yet to see anyone - except on tiny turboprops - forced to tag and check their godforsaken, obviously bigger than the fucking demonstrative cubic area display, entire motherfucking overhead compartment consuming suitcase.
Tell these fuckers, "Yeah, no." And suddenly, there won't be a problem.
Profanity because fuck you, I'm not moving my backpack under my seat and having three inches of leg room for six hours.
Is that metric or imperial zero?
Airbus A380
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Units are complicated and many people overstate the benefits of having uniform worldwide units. If I'm choosing a unit for how I sell my goods, what's more important, that the person down the street is familiar with the unit, or somebody from Ghana will be familiar if he travels to my store.
In industry, whatever tool or system you're dealing with, you're going to either use something that is either imported or exported or has to be compatible with something that is imported or exported. Thus you are guaranteed that there will be SI units somewhere in your process and it is usually just easier to go with it for the whole process, as is done in the military, NASA, and most US engineering firms. In addition to being internationally compatible, it is also a damn lot easier to use. Sure, if you use no unit but feet, pounds and seconds in your calculation there is no unit conversion that needs to be done, but as soon as you go into the range where you might think in miles or ounces, it becomes fairly difficult to reconcile intuition with units unless you do some fiddly calculations. Whereas a native SI user knows intuitively how long a Km and mm is in the same way an American might recon a mile or an inch.
So you may say: "why don't I buy a 2 pounds of apples, then walk a mile to work where I use SI to design parts and trajectories and what not?" Problem is, if you're thinking in non SI, then non SI units tend to sneak into where they don't belong. The Mars Climate Orbiter for example fell out of the sky because Lockheed used pound-seconds instead of newton-seconds in a calculation.
Considering how much success other countries have had switching, I'm always surprised at America's feeble efforts to do so. I think it is just something to do with Americans natural paranoia about as you say a "New World Order" or whatever else that prevents it.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
A better solution would be to stop building planes that have a CYLINDRICAL fuselage when all our baggage is RECTANGULAR!
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.
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.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
There is barely anything that is a foot long
But how many centimeters long is a pornstar?
Just another day in Paradise
Why not 65, 75, 85 degrees in your example?
On the highway, if I'm driving 60 mph (~100kph), I know I'm going a mile a minute. So, see a sign for "rest stop, 40 miles", I know it'll take me about 40 minutes to get there. In metric, how long does it take you to drive 64 km at 100kph?
Examples can be pulled out of each. The metric system is not some system where all math problems are magically simplified for us.