Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
What you need to bear in mind here is that the bulkheads can't be used for excessive storage, one of the learnings of the Kegworth tragedy. Moreover though you are allowed to hold handheld devices during taxi, take-off and landing, the rule of thumb there is 1 kgs, not that anyone is going to weigh anything here. But essentially that covers mobile telephones, Kindles and at a pinch smaller tablets.
In between you've got common sense, and generally speaking being hit at head height by a flying laptop as a result of the brakes coming on during the faster stages of taxiing (which feels fairly similar to hitting a brick wall at 20 mph in my one and only experience) could have really bad consequences.
I am not sure I follow the logic here with respect to seat pocket stowage. I thought that the issues with stowage in bulkhead seats were related to access issues rather than concerns about flying objects. If there was a concern about heavy objects flying out of seat pockets to hit passengers in case of accident, one would have thought that it would apply to all seats and not just bulkhead seats.
As to Kegworth, there was a long list of recommendations in the AAIB report but not a single one on bulkhead stowage or seat pocket stowage. There were discussions of seat design, cabin floor design, overhead bin design (in particular the latching mechanism and also strength of attachment of oberhead cabin to the fuselage) but there was afaik no discussion at all in the report of bulkhead stowage or seat pocket stowage.