It’s very nice to go travellin’…sometimes

Picture: British Airways

There are plenty of pithy quotes about travel, and I could be somewhat pretentious here by referencing the Taoist saying that "the journey is the reward”, but I’d prefer the kernel of Robert Louis Stephenson's oft-truncated "for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive", which says much the same thing. Because it just isn’t. Fact.

In the last three months I’ve spent a lot of time in the air. In fact, I’m writing this on my way back from Dubai on a trip that comes only a week after returning from a visit to Los Angeles. Ooh, get him! And, yes, I am aware of my extending carbon footprint... And there's even more to come. Over the course of March and the beginning of April I traversed some 7,000 miles of continental Europe on a tour of cities where my company was staging a series of customer events. All but 300 of those miles were conducted by plane, which meant that many - if not most - journeys required dealing with those [mostly] alpha male road warriors who spend much of their working lives plying these routes, hogging the overhead luggage bins and generally acting like utter cocks. Many are quite senior in their companies, spending their days in dull business review meetings, looking at pie charts and spreadsheets and barking out instructions and percentages. In other words, they are used to getting their own way in general, which leads to a sense of entitlement when they board a plane while flashing their high-tier frequent flier status (the coveted ‘gold’ level that opens up the perfumed gardens of first class lounges and the ‘priority’ boarding group - the one that gets them to their seat before the rest of us plebs, taking a provocative age to fold their raincoat neatly into the overhead bin while belligerently blocking the aisle to prevent the remaining 30 rows to fill up). At this point I have to confess that I, too, have tasted this nirvana. I’ll confess to the occasional upgrade that has propelled me to the front of the boarding queue. However, this is a double-edged sword: on the one hand you’re seated smugly with your carry-on wheelie case stowed and a hot towel with which to freshen up, but on the other hand, your remaining passengers troop past with barely concealed contempt, casting you the skunk-eye as they go.

If your only experience of air travel is an annual excursion to a beach somewhere then you’ve actually been spared the worst of it. I don’t mean that to sound elitist, but even enduring passengers who’ve been downing pints of Stella since 4.30 in the morning at the Gatwick bar are a mild irritation compared with the passive-aggression of some regular business travellers. That’s right, the armrest-hogging, stow-my-bag-sideways-in-the-locker, hover in front of the boarding aisle as if that makes actual boarding happen sooner, types who demonstrate my long-held belief that travel really does bring out the worst in people. As I am often reminded, it doesn’t really matter which class you fly in (“we’ll all get there at the same time”). Well, in principle, yes, though that doesn’t stop the pushy types who rush from the back on landing and bundle past those trying to exit their rows like cars filtering into traffic. I know that some of these serial bargers might be desperate to make a connecting flight, but the experience of many of my recent journeys has been somewhat different. “Gits,” we shall call them.

© Simon Poulter 2019

Two of the journeys in my burst of travel in March were by train, and I have to say, they restored my faith in the old locomotive. In the early days of living in Paris I used the Eurostar to get back to London for the weekend. But the prevalence of delays caused by everything from trackside fires outside Gare du Nord to illegal immigrants in the Channel Tunnel rendered the Eurostar anything less than the romantic notion of Jason Bourne-style city-to-city travel. However, recent trips from Zurich to Milan, and Milan to Lausanne reminded me that it's not at all a bad way to travel. Being the Swiss railway, the trains were punctual and comfortable, even in second class. And what better way to travel than watching lakes, snow-capped mountains and quaint chalets passing by the window? And not a single scrap for overhead locker space. Notable, too, was the absence of turbulence, or Storm Gareth which contrived to bugger up my journey into and out of Amsterdam.

So, if you haven’t taken this on board so far, travel isn’t all it's cracked up to be. It’s a refrain I’ve found myself repeating a lot in recent months, as friends have commented on what seems like near-daily Facebook posts of “Simon Poulter is travelling from Airport X to Airport Y”. And there is now some scientific evidence to prove this point. Researchers at the University of Surrey and at Sweden’s Linnaeus University recently published a report into the “darker side of hypermobility”, that group of people - which I suppose must, now, include me - who travel a lot, mainly for work and end up inducing both envy and disdain from their social circles for the never-ending updates which, perhaps, suggest a veneer of ‘jet set’ (in old money) glamour. Underlying this, however, is anything but glamour.

The study found that frequent travel bears three types of risk: physiological, psychological and emotional, and social. The physiological is, essentially, jet lag but unbeknownst to most who succumb to it with their travels is the fact that spending extended hours crossing oceans, continents and timezones speeds up the ageing process and raises the risk of a heart attack or stroke. And that’s on top of deep-vein thrombosis, absorbing strangers’ germs (and not necessarily from airplane toilet seats - your tray table is a proper little germ farm), and exposure to levels of radiation for some frequent flyers that goes well beyond regulatory limits on the ground. Add to that, a lack of exercise and poor diet, and you’ve got a cocktail of lethality.

The view from seat 68K
© Simon Poulter 2019

The Surrey/Linnsaeus study then found that business travel takes its toll psychologically and emotionally, especially when you combine the isolation of often travelling alone and separated from loved ones with work stress (especially managing e-mail and incoming demands while on the move). A study of World Bank employees found that there was a three times-higher likelihood of frequent business travellers making insurance claims about psychological mistreatment. Finally, the study also identified a social impact, in particular, the creation of ‘war brides’. Most business travellers are male (the French hotel group Accor found in a 2011 survey that 74% of Asian business travellers were men), adding pressure on partners who remain at home, especially with children. There was even evidence that friendships suffer, as frequent business travellers prioritise immediate family when they are back on home soil.

Even factoring in that those who travel abroad for work the most tend to be in the upper echelons of the corporate ladder, and are therefore more likely to be compensated for it, being part of the “mobile elite” is not all champagne flutes at 39,000ft. Well, it might be for some, but for the vast majority of us, compressed into an economy class seat by corporate travel policies, and racing to catch connecting flights because the company travel agency found the only routing that was ‘in policy’, spare a thought for the mounting expenses backlog and the utter dirge of truly awful airline food. And take pity on us - well, me in particular - who’ve succumbed to the reality of air travel, which, perhaps more than any other form of organised movement, seems to generate a sense of entitlement, regarding professional and social achievement as that nirvana of over-inflated privilege, the airline lounge, and who regularly put up with the vagaries, the ageing plane fleets and the penny-pinching contempt of pledging unstinting loyalty to one airline over another to get in there. Have pity.

Computer says no. Again.

Picture: British Airways

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” he probably wasn’t considering flying any distance in economy class. Airlines today are so cost-conscious (i.e. profit-minded) that those utopian days of the proletariat joining the jet-set are now a distant memory as we cram into 10-abreast seats too narrow, and in rows so tight we resemble the enmeshed and entangled bodies of Picasso’s Guernica.

Now, I know what an elitist (and faintly pretentious) thing that is to say, but as my new job will involve frequent international travel, which means flying economy in accordance with responsible company rules (unless upgrades can be scored by a combination of personal cash and general obsequiousness at the gate...), I have a vested interest. And because the majority of my airline loyalty points are with dear old British Airways, I will probably be defaulting to the creaking flag carrier, just to maintain my lounge status. Yes, that’s just how shallow frequent flyers are. Except that BA, once the “world’s favourite airline”, no longer is. In fact, events - largely, it would appear, of their own making - have contrived to make BA anything but.

BA's CEO Alex Cruz will probably be glad to see the back of September: earlier this month he had apologise before the media after it transpired that BA’s website had been hacked - possibly over the course of several days - during which data including customers’ e-mail addresses and credit card information (including critical three-digit CVV codes) was lifted, affecting some 380,000 transactions. Just this last weekend the airline suffered yet another “technical issue with some of our internal systems” (or ‘IT failure’ in clearer parlance) at its hub, Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. Once again, this led to horrendous check-in queues and delays of up to two hours (“slight”, according to BA) to flights all over the world as computers managing the entire bag drop-to-boarding process fell over.

Twitter, as ever, bore the brunt of passengers’ frustrations: journalist Andrew Neil vented: “Yet another computer failure at Terminal 5 Heathrow for British Airways. Now regular occurrence. Flights delayed. Usual shambles, not yet on huge scale.” I’d hardly call it “regular”, but BA’s recent history of IT disasters certainly warrants the “shambles” part. “I think somebody at your organisation should press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and just start again,” another tweeted. BA strenuously denied that computer failure was at fault, calling it a “temporary glitch with some of our internal systems”. In other words, an IT failure.

IT problems have been at the core of BA’s worsening reputation in recent years. Having rolled out its new “cost-effective” ‘BA FLY’ IT system in 2015, it has been beset with problems. Employees reported it breaking within only a few weeks of coming onstream, leading to heavy delays at Heathrow and Gatwick. Almost a year later, on 7 July, 2016, the system suffered another failure, causing enormous queues for check-in at Heathrow. The system was to break down twice more that month, and again the following September, causing problems for the airline throughout the world. And then, in May this year, BA suffered its most reputation-damaging outage to date, when an employee error brought down the BA network leaving 75,000 passengers, their luggage and their planes stranded around the world, leading to 670 cancelled flights and a heavy dent in BA’s profits to boot. It’s easy to blame IT failures, but then again, they shouldn’t be happening so often to all the ‘mission-critical’ parts of an airline’s day-to-day operations, like check-in, baggage and boarding. And a multi-million pound retail activity like a national flag carrier's website, shouldn't be getting so comprehensively compromised by hackers. The suspicion is that penny-pinching, as BA obsessively tries to compete with budget airlines like easyJet and Ryanair, is undoing the reputation of an airline that once justifiably claimed to be one of the world’s best.

It’s no accident that most of my frequent flyer miles are with BA, built up mainly over the 17 years I lived abroad and made frequent trips back to the UK. However, over those years, the quality of BA’s service has noticeably eroded, and not just when ‘turning right’ into the supposedly cheap seats. Eager to cram in as many people has possible, even BA’s business class cabin has shrunk, squeezing rows tighter. Business class is where any airline makes its money, but without the high volume of economy passengers, a global carrier like BA would struggle. On short-haul flights, economy passengers now have to pay for snacks. This might be expected on budget airlines, but even when those sandwiches come from Marks and Spencer, it only adds to the cheapening of the BA product.The airline is also somewhat behind on what it provides for long-haul flights: the other week I flew to San Francisco on a 22-year-old Boeing 747. It’s a dear old aircraft - perhaps my favourite widebody still flying - but is definitely showing its age. Even BA's inclusion - finally! - of inflight WiFi on the outbound flight (notably missing on the return trip…) and a refresh of the seats doesn’t mask the fact that other airlines are streets ahead in bringing new planes into their fleets. But even where BA has introduced new aircraft, there are mixed results.

Picture: British Airways

A while ago I flew to Newark in New Jersey from Heathrow in one of BA’s new Boeing 787 Dreamliners, an aircraft much vaunted for innovations to enhance passenger comfort. The reality was that, flying in economy, it was probably the most uncomfortable flight I’ve ever experienced. Similar complaints can be found online of BA’s Dreamliner service between London and San Jose (a return journey on such planes I’ll be taking at the end of October...). Rather than being a sumptuous experience, BA has, it would appear, crammed as many revenue-bearing seats and rows into the 787 as possible. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to it, to the extent that when I repeat the trip to California in December I’ll be booking myself back onto the ageing 747, flying to San Francisco and putting up with a long hour on the 101 freeway to get down to San Jose.

Of course, I have options. Even with corporate travel, there are probably better options with other airlines, but these will almost certainly involve either American carriers (to avoid at all costs) or time- and patience-sapping stopovers where, inevitably, luggage will go missing, to be retrieved usually after the trip is complete. And now I think of it, BA’s history of losing luggage is not one to be proud of.

Whether they admit it or not (and I’m still prepared to defend it), BA has lost its sheen. Middle-eastern airlines like Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, have long eclipsed BA for service, comfort and innovations. Likewise one or two of the Asian carriers, like Singapore and Cathay Pacific. In Europe, I’ve had better experience with Air France, KLM and Lufthansa, carriers of similar or equal historical standing to BA. CNN’s business and travel reporter Richard Quest recently blogged that BA-bashing is “a national pastime”, saying that its status as a national institution put it on a similar par to the BBC or the Church of England for sniping. But having travelled almost exclusively with BA for many, many years, its decline - while not necessarily acute - has been palpable. A spoon fewer here, a more basic meal there - it all adds up. Quest points out that BA is, at least, refreshing its fleet with newer, more efficient planes like the Airbus A380, the Dreamliner and the A350 (which, in the example of the Finnair examples I’ve been on, is extremely comfortable), but if it is just going to squeeze in the maximum number of economy seats as possible, as my experience already of a BA 787 has found, all they are doing is putting Ryanair-standard cabins in the air on premium routes.

Picture: British Airways

Not everyone can fly in business class, and yet those of us flying economy on corporate tickets have often forked out business class pricing, as business travel agents tend to book expensive, fully flexible tickets, rather than the cheap-and-cheerful prices we see as consumers when booking our holidays. I have no problem with budget airlines: easyJet and BA’s own stablemate, Vueling, are perfectly fine for travelling down to the Mediterranean, for work or pleasure. But for long distances, the sort of flights that made BA the national flag carrier to begin with, there’s a sense of non-premium passengers being treated like commodities. I recognise the argument that we, as travellers, want to fly for the least amount of money possible, but I also think that if you want no-frills, you fly with a no-frills carrier (like Norwegian). For what British Airways charges for its longer flights, you’d have thought that passenger comfort - for those of us who ‘turn right’, would be given more attention.

As Quest points out in his post, BA will be 100 years old next year, “a perfect chance to turbo charge the necessary changes”. It was, once, a pioneer, introducing things like premium economy, in which you can ‘almost’ experience business class without paying the high price. Perhaps with a little premium thinking BA could do something about overhauling its currently bruised reputation, both on the ground and in the air.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

"When Qantas created the 'Kangaroo Route' [from Australia] to London in 1947, it took four days and nine stops. Now it will take just 17 hours from Perth non-stop." So declared, yesterday, the chief executive of Australian airline Qantas while announcing plans to launch the first regular passenger flight directly between Australia and Europe.

Just think about it: 17 hours, probably sat in economy class. Not even in my most slovenly moments of box-set binge-watching could I imagine being able to remain mostly inert, squeezed into an airline seat for the equivalent of how much I'm normally awake during an average day. With four toilets between 232 passangers. Even an upgrade to business class wouldn't make much difference.

Despite my phobia that Australia contains most things that can kill you, it remains a country I would love to visit. But with my occasional flights out to the US West Coast at the very edge of long-haul tolerance (my longest-ever journey - San Francisco to Taipei - was partially aided by an accidental over-prescription of sleeping pills), the only way I could ever manage going Down Under would be by stopping halfway in Dubai or Los Angeles. I know a direct flight would keep the overall trip relatively brief, but I just don't think the risk of DVT, air rage (mine or others') or being sat next to someone with personal hygeine issues for 17 hours is worth shaving half a day off the flying time.

Even the prospect of flying on a Boeing Dreamliner - a plane that actually lives up to its manufacturer's hype and is both more comfortable for the passenger and more economic for the airline - doesn't make the ordeal any easier to contemplate. You'd still feel housebound at 38,000ft, and there are still only so many episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Friends you can take.

Guess I picked the wrong week to give up drinking

Taking a plane was, once, an exercise in projected sophistication, where even the most proletariat of us felt like Cary Grant at the mere possession of a boarding pass. But that all changed when everyone decided to get in on it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: travel brings out the worst in everyone, rendering modern air travel considerably less of the glamfest it once was. Once you've survived the public humiliation of walking barefoot through a full body scanner, your beltless trousers displaying that you're too cheap to actually buy Calvin Klein underwear, you must then witness the utter desperation of "speedy boarding" as families leg it for the departure gate...despite being transferred to the plane by bus. This is then followed by gittish overhead locker space hogging (avoiding selling a kidney just to put a bag in the hold) before taking a seat in a row so tight even regularly-sized people need a boarding pass for each buttock. And all that before being charged the equivalent of Uruguay's national debt for a half tub of Pringles while suffering spine-shattering mid-air turbulence caused by global warming, which has itself been contributed to by all this flying.

Air travel is hell, so it's no surprise that people turn up for flights not-so elegantly wasted or break open their duty-free tequila as soon as the seatbelt signs are turned off. However, as bossy teachers (if I can use that brand) used to say, "there's always one who spoils it for the others". Actually, it's more than one - hen parties and rugby club tours, mostly, who seem unable to fly an hour or so on CheapyJet to Tallinn or Puerto Banus without first consuming a weekend's worth of grog before they've even left the airport bar. Which is not what airport bars are for.

Pre-flight drinking used to be part of the glamour. An exotic cocktail in the company of interesting, erudite international travellers, or a couple of strong ones to calm the nerves of the nervous flyer, or a romantic glass of champagne to get the honeymoon off to a gooey-eyed start. But, no. Despite airports being partially designed to encourage drinking via concourse bars and duty-free shops, the trouble is that too many people are availing themselves too much.

In February, a six-man stag party flying to Bratislava from Luton was arrested after brawling onboard the plane, leading to it being diverted to Berlin. A month later a group of 24 Irish men were thrown off a flight to Costa Rica after allegedly becoming "drunk and abusive" as it waited for takeoff at Gatwick Airport. In May a woman found to be "unresponsive" and slumped in her seat was ordered off an easyJet plane to Paphos before it had even left Manchester Airport...punching the pilot in the process, forcing the airline to replace him, delaying the flight further. And it's not just those 'turning right' at the aircraft door causing trouble: last December, Finnish dress designer Leena Romu attacked a flight attendant as she was boarding a Virgin plane to Dubai, "noticeably unsteady on her feet" and clutching bottles (plural) of duty-free. She was flying First Class.

By and large these are isolated incidents, but the increasing regularity with which they are being reported appears to be enough for Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Aviation, to decide to look into doing something about it. "If you’re a young family travelling on a plane you want to go from point A to B, you don’t want to be disrupted," Ahmad said last week (and good that the UK's aviation minister gets the concept of travelling from one place to another...). He does, though, have a point. "I don’t think we want to kill merriment altogether," he added, "but I think it’s important that passengers who board planes are also responsible and have a responsibility to other passengers, and that certainly should be the factor which we bear in mind."

In 30-plus years of frequent flying I've been rarely troubled by boozy passengers: there was my first ever long-haul flight, to Los Angeles, when I stupidly picked seat 52A of a Virgin Atlantic 747. Not only was I in the smoking section (remember those? Not fun on a 13-hour flight...), but I was sat next to a chain-smoking, G&T-guzzling bit-part actor heading home. He had a grand sounding name (and is still active - I've checked), who told me he'd been in the soap All My Children and episodes of Murder She Wrote. There very nearly was a murder in seat 52B as "Claude" continuously ordered more to drink as he rattled on about Angela Landsbury and Cabot Cove until, thankfully, passing out somewhere over Canada. That, and a pair of American technology salesmen (identified by their tan chinos, golf shirts and loud voices) sat in front of me on a recent British Airways flight from London to Paris, and managed to get loaded on tiny bottles of wine in just the 45 minutes we were in the air, is about it. Perhaps I've been lucky or, perhaps, these incidents have been blown out of proportion by the press. But police statistics obtained under a freedom of information request have shown that over the last two years more than 400 people have been arrested on suspicion of being drunk on flights in the UK.

Out of 250 million passengers handled by British airports each year, that may not sound a lot, but if one of those 400 disrupted your holiday, you'd be justifiably annoyed. And it's something the airlines themselves say needs to be tackled. It is certainly enough of a nuisance problem for the British Government to consider action. A first step would be identifying whether or not the current rules do enough to prevent a bit of fun turning into something more serious. Currently, bars at British airports are allowed to be open according to the earliest and latest flights of the day, a common practice at most airports around the world, and in the case of London's Gatwick, for example, means the taps are open as early as 4am for those departing on holiday flights.

Furthermore, airport bars are not subjected to the same licensing restrictions as pubs, bars and restaurants on the outside, and can, in theory, be open 24 hours a day. This, says Lord Ahmad, is something that "needs to be looked at". Last week the new UK Aviation Industry Code of Practice on Disruptive Passengers was published and included guidance to cabin crew that duty-free booze shouldn't be opened in-flight, and that terminal bars should stop selling alcohol to passengers showing signs of drunkeness (which, I thought, was already the case, along with check-in desk personnel being trained to spot - and smell - drunken behaviour). New rules will mean that any alcohol bought in duty-free shops should be stored on flights away from passengers or in bags that should remain sealed for the duration of the flight. At present, it would appear, nothing prevents sealed duty-free shopping from being opened once onboard.

"I don't think we want to kill merriment altogether," Ahmad said last week, adding that passengers do "have a responsibility to other passengers". Quite how far the government will go, however is - if you can excuse the pun - up in the air. Simon Calder, travel editor of The Independent, says that any action is unlikely to lead to an outright drinking ban at airports or on planes. "It won't happen with a straightforward booze ban", he told ITV's Good Morning Britain. "There'll be various techniques [the government] will be looking at, such as opening hours and restricting the number of drinks you can have. You may have to have your boarding card scanned or marked so you only have a couple of drinks." Breathalyzing passengers at risk of being drunk might be another possibility, Calder said, and it might be done "on a flight-by-flight basis", given that the same 'party' destinations crop up in the charge sheet of reported incidents.

"With air travel proving more popular than ever, and passenger numbers expected to rise across the whole of the UK in the coming years, now is the time to tackle this problem collectively," said Tim Alderslade, Chief Executive of the British Air Transport Association and Ed Anderson, Chairman of the Airport Operators Association, in a joint statement.

You can't knock their initiative, of course, or indeed the desire of airlines to tackle the problem. But equally you can't help feeling that it is a problem that, while the industry hasn't exactly created it, has certainly benefited from financially in both making air travel more available, and getting people to pay hansomely at airport bars for a few pints too many at Stupid O'Clock in the morning. Perhaps it is time to reign this in.

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.