Starlionblue wrote:Finally someone said it.... I'm all for figuring out how to stop people taking hand luggage on an evacuation, but I'm dead set against stopping hand luggage altogether.
There's no "finally" about it; I said as much upthread!
But to avoid any confusion: I completely agree, for two reasons.
1. Banning cabin baggage would massively inconvenience millions of air passengers each day, for what *might* be an incremental improvement in safety during some evacuations. I don't necessarily see that tradeoff as worth it. As others have noted, it would also increase insurance costs and, even if it shortened lines at security, will increase lines at check-in.
All safety calculations involve a degree of tradeoffs. Installing passenger seats facing the rear of the cabin would be safer than installing them facing forward, but pax like to see where they are going, rather than where they've been. So in that case, nearly every airline in the world situates the seats facing forward.
(When I was very young I flew on a Trident with rear-facing seats; I still remember that, but nothing else from the trip!)
2. Even a few cases of someone going without essential medicines (diabetics with insulin, etc.) could more than obviate any safety gains. Even one case of a battery fire in the cargo hold that could easily have been extinguished in the cabin will obviate any safety gains.
Judging from a lot of these comments here, I'd say that the people proposing to ban cabin baggage have an pre-existing axe to grind against cabin baggage, and they're using SU1492 as a pretext to push their agenda.