Originally Posted by
lloydah
^ apart from the fee charging. If the cabin baggage was limited to acceptable size surely there would be one place per seat.
Unfortunately, no. The spacing of the bins (each of which can hold 3 legal-sized carryons) is fixed, while the airlines continue to shrink the seat pitch in order to cram a few more rows into coach. That can create a situation where there are more seats in coach than there is bin space for overhead; it's not one bin slot per passenger. And then there's the matter of the bulkhead and exit row seats which generally don't have any under-seat storage, so ALL of their items have to go overhead. As I recall reading, there's only enough overhead bin space for about 75% of the economy class passengers' full-sized carryons (if everyone was carrying a carry-on as well as a personal item).
The airlines created this problem by incentivizing people to carry on while simultaneously reducing the amount of overhead space available on a per-person basis. The way to fix it is to flip the current fee structure so that carryons cost money while one checked bag is free, and to improve in-transit security and timely delivery of checked luggage. But the airlines aren't going to do that: that would cost money, and every bag stuffed in an overhead bin instead of being checked frees up some room for more-lucrative commercial cargo in the hold.