It’s saddening that flying has become something akin to colonoscopy – a necessary agony. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on whether I blame the airplane companies for this (who, due to the high barrier of entry, have become near-monopolies and thus don’t innovate and worry only about cost-cutting) or the government (which imposes all these rules and fees on the airline companies) or the industry itself (it’s just bound to suck).

The newest annoyance (or maybe the newest for me as previously I haven’t felt the pain) is the airlines’ decision to charge for checked luggage which incentivizes everyone on the flight to carry large carry-ons. Combined with densely packed seats, this means that there is no room for all the carry-ons on the plane so some passengers are forced to check their carry-on in. Which sucks if you have things in your carry-on that can get damaged, if you don’t want to incur additional delay at arrival, hate how the baggage is handled, worry about it being lost or stolen, and so on — I’m sure the list goes on.

The most annoying thing? Somehow airlines didn’t think it fair to randomize the selection of carry-ons so those in later groups always get penalized while those in group 2 almost never do.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2011 at 07:46 and is filed under The Daily Badness, changes/cyclical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.