What a carry on!

And so I find myself in Barcelona - both a perk and necessity of my job, so I'm not complaining - but getting here was another test of whether it is better to travel or to arrive.

I visit the delightful Catalan capital every year for a telecoms industry event, and each time I give serious thought to taking the train. Even if the reality of rail travel is not always so, there is something decidedly romantic and decadent about travelling by train across Europe. If it's good enough for James Bond, it's good enough for me.

However, being a work trip, spending half a day watching cows, telegraph poles and rustic charm fly past the window just isn't viable when there are things to do at the other end. So the plane wins and because it's a work trip, there's little choice of airline or comfort level. Again, not complaining, but as anyone who travels frequently will attest, taking the plane takes most of the strain. In fact, it is more of an exercise in ordeal management.

Since the beginning of December I have taken 19 flights, for business and for personal reasons. That, I recognise, might sound quite a lot of air travel, but it's nowhere near as much as those business executives who casually list "an airport somewhere" as a location in their Twitter bio. Certainly, though, it is more than people who fly just a couple of times a year, to and from a beach.

But no matter how often you fly, when you do you will encounter humanity at its most selfish and broken. You will be reminded - without any room for doubt - that travel doesn't broaden the mind at all and, in practice, appears to do the exact opposite. 

Firstly, you would have thought that in the 14 whole years since 9/11 the concept of "tighter security" would have sunk in. But, no. Some clearly didn't get the memo, a whole teenager's lifetime ago, that being "prepared to fly" means removing shoes, belts and overcoats, and taking liquids, laptops and iPads out of carry-on luggage.

Then to the next pain point: the boarding process. Here, no one airport, nationality or airline has the monopoly on stupid. It would be wholly wrong to single out queuing chaos at French and Italian boarding gates as simply cultural unfamiliarity with the concept of queuing, because American airports are just as bad, if not worse. "We will be boarding you by row number" should not be too hard to comprehend. Clearly it is, judging by those who consider this information inapplicable to them, and adopt the "Que?" expression of Manuel in Fawlty Towers when told that it's not their turn.

All that said, security queues and cretinous gate behaviour (and that perennial flying aggravation, the dickhead - because it usually is a bloke - reclining their seat for a journey of less than an hour's duration) pale into irritation-free insignificance when it comes to carry-on luggage. 

There are two aspects of this that we should consider: first, 'carry-on' should actually refer to a bag that you can, you know, carry-on, as opposed to dragging it like a Victorian rail porter handling trunks for the European tour. It shouldn't really require wheels, either, if it is to faithfully support the category it falls under. And then there is the insistence that because you can drag a wheely bag on board, everybody does it, leading to a recreation of the Ben Hur chariot race on budget flights as everybody charges forward to nab the overhead locker space.

When budget airlines first began, carry-on luggage was just that. But now, luggage has - like most other aspects of society: cars, fast food and teenagers - super-sized, requiring Airbus and Boeing to redesign their aircraft with those pop-up tent extensions that you used to get on Volkswagen Dormobiles. Because, there we all are on most flights, queing with one foot in the plane's door, while somewhere around the corner an idiot is trying to hump half their bodyweight into an open overhead locker a good foot beyond their reach.

There was a time when you checked in at the airport, usually at the crack of dawn, to be met by a slightly surly check-in person (not surprising, given the hour) clacking away at a keyboard for no obvious reason. In exchange for handing over your luggage, this person would give you a boarding pass, allowing you to skip on through security to gorge your credit card on duty free. And then, at the end of the flight, you'd assemble at the baggage carousel like an expectant parent at the school gate, feeling your blood pressure rising as everyone else's bags went past on the conveyor belt before yours eventually arrived like that last wheezing London Marathon runner dressed as Tower Bridge.

But in our instant, must-have-it-now society, checking in your bags is far too much faff. No, for the sake of saving 15 minutes at the other end, take your bags with you. And, thanks to Ryanair and others, you'll be incentivised to doing so by saving you the exorbitant cost of putting luggae in the hold. Which means people do everything they can to stuff whatever they can into their carry-on bags, which they then shove into the overhead locker without regard for anyone getting anything else in.

The airlines, however, are somewhat to blame for this. The lack of consistency in luggage limits is one issue: some airlines limit you to 20kg for hold bags, while for others its 23kg each. For those travelling in premium seats, you could enjoy up to 32kg...or two or more bags of 23kg each. Confused? For carry-on baggage, there is generally a 23kg weight limit and in principle some sort of limit on the size. Not that I've ever seen any rigid checking on either - people could have gold bars stuffed into their wheelie bag for all I could tell.

Not surprisingly, then, as passengers insist on bringing on everything and the kitchen sink, things can get dangerous. Late last year a writer from North London, Wayne Herbert, was reportedly suing British Airways after getting injured by a rucksack falling from an overhead locker as his flight waited for take off. "Passengers sitting in the row behind were trying to load too much luggage into the overhead," Herbert told the Evening Standard, "and dropped a bag on my head. It bashed me on the top of my head, and has given me a whiplash injury." A similiar thing happened on another BA flight, heading for Bangkok, when a bag fell from an overhead locker during takeoff itself, landing heavily on the head of the passenger below.

It isn't an exclusively British Airways problem, and most cabin crew I see make every effort to ensure lockers - like our seatbelts and tray tables - are secured before takeoff. But accidents do happen, and it wouldn't surprise me if the lockers themselves struggle to cope with what gets stuffed into them on a regular basis.

More must be done by airlines to make more rigourous checks for both weight and size of carry-on bags. And redesigning lockers is not the answer, either. Boeing was said to be working with the American carriers United and Delta to design luggage space to fit passengers' expectations of what they can bring on board, especially given the punitive charges US airlines charge for checked luggage. 

The problem, however, is not just baggage fees - people simply want to bring more on board with them. "For passengers, volume doesn't really matter. It's whether or not my bag fits," Boeing's cabin expert Kent Craver told the Daily Mail in 2012. They also want to stow their bag where they sit. "They don't want it 20 rows behind them or 20 rows in front of them, because that causes a lot of anxiety."

Understandable as that is, the potentially deadly fire that broke out last September on a BA Boeing 777 at Las Vegas' McCarran Airport highlighted the problem of hand luggage, as passengers were seen leaving the burning plane carrying their carry-on bags. Presumably they would have been reaching for them as the evacuation instruction was being given.

So, even if new planes like the 787 Dreamliner and A350 are designed with new storage space, until airlines get tougher on the weight and quantity of bags being taken on board, problems of the boarding process being held up - a cost to the airline and a frustration to both crew and other passengers - will never be solved.