Bigger Bins

Lately, almost all the news coming out about airlines has been, well, bad for us and good for them. But now, the airlines are actually doing something for us passengers. Especially those of us who are strict carry-on fliers. Many of our favorite airlines are replacing their overhead bins with newer versions that will hold more bags. Yeah.

 Bigger Bins

Comments

[Joe]

I will miss one of my favorite forms of airline entertainment - watching someone try to fit too large a bag into the overhead bin, failing and then trying an identical bin on the other side. Eventually, people will begin carrying even larger and heavier bags aboard and we'll be back to where we are now.

The airlines should strictly enforce their carry-on size limits. If someone arrives at a gate with a bag that is too large it should be gate-checked, at double the regular fee.

[Alan B]

Somewhat larger bins that allow placement of a bag as large as the usual wheeled 22 x 14 x 9 carry-on case transversely certainly help, but for the typical economy section on a single aisle plane, there still would not be enough space for everyone to so stow a bag. If the bin spacing is 48 inches, yielding maybe 43 usable linear inches, that would allow three bags placed transversely,in two bins above each three rows of three seats at a never better than 32 inch pitch, i.e., 96 inches. That equates to SIX bag slots for the NINE seats, so whenever the plane is more than two-thirds full, one passenger out of three won't have a bin space.

[Frank@OBOW]

The capacity for carry-on bags is increasingly dramatically. No, not everyone will be accommodated, however, a lot more will than are now. And remember, not everyone brings a full size carry-on aboard.

As an example, right now United Airbus 320's can handle 64 rolling bags. After the change they'll handle 106. The plane's capacity is 136 to 144 depending on the layout. That means 75% of the passengers could bring on full size rolling carry-ons and be able to put them in the overhead.

http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2012/03/airlines-get-bigger-overhead-bins/641131/1?csp=34travel&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UsatodaycomTravel-TopStories+%28Travel+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

[Alan B]

"75% of the passengers could bring on full size rolling carry-ons and be able to put them in the overhead. "

That certainly could and hopefully will be true. In that A320, over the First Class seats, at 38-inch pitch, each of the twelve seats should have a bin space; that's 12 bags. Beyond that dozen, United offers Economy Plus, pitch of 36 inches. For those seven rows, there would be about five four foot wide bins, i.e., space for about 30 bags for forty-two seats.It's just rows 22-37, 16 rows in all, ninety-six seats, 60 bags in ten bins,where the crunch particularly hits. As for the additional four bags. 102 is pretty close to 106 and hopefully the latter is the true count.

(Source is SeatGuru for a UAL A320 Version 2.)