Originally Posted by
studio76
I recently took a Southwest flight after a 6 year hiatus and ended up in the row directly behind the over wing exit. The passengers in the exit rows were allowed to keep their carry on luggage stored on the floor underneath the seat in front of them - the FA did an exit row briefing with these passengers, and noted the items on the floor and just said they had to be tucked in tight. Is this normal?
I cannot recall any other carrier allowing ANYTHING on the floor in these rows and was quite surprised by this.
"These rows" is not specific enough.
Where no airline allows you to put bags in front of you is a bulkhead row. Well, on some airplanes (like AA's 777), the exit rows (31A/B/E/F) are bulkheads. (Though the bulkhead is mighty far away, on the other side of wing, the point is there is no row of seats in front of you.) But it's the bulkhead, not the exit row factor, that precludes underseat storage.
Same thing can happen in row 9 (and the window seats of row 10) of AA's 757s.
But on 737s (which all that Southwest flies), whether Southwest or AA or anyone else I've seen, the only exit rows are over the wing, and do have normal rows in front of them (just at greater spacing, at least for some seats in the row). You can thus use that stroage.
The one extra condition in an exit row is that the hand baggage must fit "completely" under the seat in front of you (so that people exiting in an emergency cannot trip on it). Thus FAs may be more strict about baggage that "sticks out" a bit in an exit row than in other rows.
You have to look up airplanes by airline and type on
www.seatguru.com to find out what the underseat storage is for special rows. It explains that AA's 777 row 31 has no underseat storage, but doesn't have such a note for Southwest's 737s.