As this is the singular largest pet peeve I have about flying, it may sound bad, so a diatribe is coming on the topic. The easy part is not hitting someone with my now-arcing bag. The hard part is motivating myself to avoid doing it. Some day I'm afraid I'm just not going to care anymore and let someone have it. And while there are already strong feelings on this thread about how lashing out at the belt lice is unacceptable and while I'm normally a very polite person (otherwise I'd be right up there, all elbows, mobbing the belt), there's something about airports that brings out the stupidest in people. Or in my case, the urge to send a 60lb bag arcing off and laying someone right out.

As is, I just pick my spot downwind from where the bags come out and stand about 5 feet back (always a clear spot, I don't intentionally stand behind people and then get indignant. That would be stupid). But I always leave enough that someone could walk between me and the belt with a luggage cart so as to not impede them. Occasionally when I'm with my GF, I'll announce "there it is", but not for her benefit. That's a warning to the people in front. But if it's clear that the person in front is not about to pick up a bag or move out of the way, I make no effort to be discrete and polite about walking straight toward the belt to pick them up, making space as necessary (unless it's children or people with mobility issues, obviously). Anyone who choses to stand in the way has put themselves there knowing I'm behind them, and as such accept the chance that their bags might come out afterward. Normally, they do. They're also generally rather heavy, as I like to do some stocking up on the local specialties wherever I go, the added bonus being not too much danger of people taking them.... very far.

While it may seem rude, at this point I just don't care anymore. I've seen multiple instances where people bunch up at the baggage carousel directly in front of me so that one person can take the bags off and the rest stand around an point out which bag belongs to the person taking the bags off. You're travelling together! This is your bag! How can you not know this?! Or, in another situation, three college girls getting bags off directly in front of me, all of them waiting around for all of the bags to appear. When they go to a coffee shop do they get their coffee and stand at the till for everyone's drink to show up? It drives me mad, really. So there's no love lost anymore.

After a particularly nasty trip home at Christmas (brilliant trip, just some slow luggage), I got into a discussion about this with my brother who, while travelling less, is much more realistic with his expectations of people and as usual he brought up a good point: Even if everyone stands back, the benefits to one person pushing forward are much greater than the drawbacks. It's the big problem with everyone taking three big steps back, that only one person needs to do it to kill the system (because people at the airport are sheep, even more than normal). Game theory says mobbing the belt is the most efficient solution if you're only concerned about yourself.

While it would be great to set up a system to fix this, I think the only real way to achieve it is to actually make sure priority tagging works and that the FF bags do come out first, in some sort of reasonable timeframe. Then at least there's the chance that if you get there quickly enough, there won't be the belt lice as they've been caught up on the way. Occasionally this has worked at LHR T3, where I can breeze through immigration and have the bags come out with the first canister, while the lice are still jammed up, probably stuck in the tensabarriers like a net, if they aren't confused between a passport and a shoe.

Gah, just thinking about this is getting me irritated.