weighing carry-on bags as passengers board would increase the time it takes to board two-fold. If you can't lift it over your head by yourself without the help of a 120# woman then it's probably too heavy.

That would certainly speed up the check-in procedure.

I don't want the airline weighing my carry-on because I packed it taking into account the carrier's guidelines and my own strength; these two limits seem pretty clear to me and it would be great if people would think about them before boarding.

Certainly passengers have some responsibilty in this area and they should exercise it. Airlines have enough more important tasks to accomplish when trying to get flights off safely and on time than deal with passengers who don't use common sense.

AS Flyer , thanks once again for your sensible and informative posts.

AS Flyer, Please stop posting while I am posting!

What can I say, that old saying must be true.... great minds think alike!!!!

Originally posted by tfong007:

why blame the passenger for bringing an overweight bag on the plane?

Because they packed it maybe? You can't be serious that the airline has the responsibilty for this?

If it's not the passenger's fault the bag that they packed so much in to that they cannot lift it, who's fault is it? Why not blame the luggage manufacturer because they made a bag that has so much space in it that it allows you to overpack?

Are you sure you're not American? I didn't know the "it's never my fault or responsibility" mentality had started to spread to the rest of the world.

One big diffrence though. The pax's are the customers and the FA's are paid employess on the job. I'm not excusing anyones rude behavior, but at any job, employees are paid and expected to put up with customers.

I believe you misquoted, by omission, the poster's point in your response. He was talking about his mother. Even a not too heavy bag would be alot for most elderly women.

Helping her put her bag in the overhead would be equivalent to helping a little old lady cross the street. So, since when is it not the FA's job to be helpful?

Not to criticize little old ladies (in whose company are numbered many of the senior Law Lord clan), but that little old lady somehow got that bag out of her house, into a car or bus or taxi, out at the airport, over to the check-in counter, through security, down the concourse, and onto the plane, before it became too heavy to lift up into the overhead rack. (And why didn't she put it under her seat?)

I most likely would have helped that little old lady with her bag. It would be my guess that it wasn't that heavy since she managed to carry it that far.... sometimes it's just a little difficult for smaller, elderly people to reach the overheads and to lift anything above their heads. If it was way too big or heavy for me to heft up over our heads I would have offered to drag it to the front door to check. It is within my job description to assist people with carry-ons. It is not within that same description for me to lift heavy bags over my head that could potentially cause injury. There's a difference.

I read the same article. The man who wrote the article was NOT a REPORTER. Reporters are credentialed employees of a recognized news media organization. This guy was a free-lance WRITER. Big difference. This isn't the first time that a free-lancer has gotten into a situation like this with no proof of his role.

While it's true that it's not illegal to take pictures of someone in a public area, if he had produced media credentials, even a business card, he would have been treated way different than someone who might have been lying about being a reporter.

As for the person kicked off AirTran...
Well, that'll teach 'em for flying AirTran (just kidding). If this happened to me, I'd have complied, left the plane and started raising holy hell with the gate agents. The key here is not to contest or battle it out with the crew. The less contentious you are, the better your case will be that you were not a problem to begin with.

Then once you're off that AirTran flight, you can ask one of the gate agents for their cell phone so you can call in a bomb threat to their private backdoor phone number, like one of their FAs did last week...and was caught within a few hours. Doh!