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Comment by supportengineer | Hacker News Reader

I would be interested in the following other types of special flights:

- Flights where no one is a first-time traveller, in fact you must have flown at least 20 times.

- Flights with no overhead bins at all.

Airlines could easily solve the overhead delay issue by adopting their carry-on price structure for checked bags, they simply don't want to.

Either way I'd still do carry-on even with a bag fee. Every time I've trusted an airline to handle bags they manage to violate that trust in new and exciting ways.

On a majority of flights that I'm on, someone always happens to sit in the wrong seat. Inevitably, a flight attendant then has to come over, usually against the flow of boarding passengers to sort out the situation.

I don't know how to improve upon the existing signage. Maybe have a personalized interactive experience? When your ticket is scanned, lights in the floor guide you to your exact seat.

Why do to have to do more than say, "my ticket says 24C and you are sitting in my seat" ?

It's probably a rule written somewhere but here it goes, any part of a process that relies on humans to cooperate is guaranteed trouble.

Not on an airline, but in a movie theater: I was sitting in a pre-purchased, assigned aisle seat in an auditorium with about 4 other souls present. I had commandeered the seat next to me and laid down my hat, phone, food and drink.

Well an old lady on her own comes right up to me, a little before the film starts, and she indicates that's her seat. So I thought, okay weird, she purchased a seat right next to an occupied one? Whatever. So I bail out all my stuff and I just lay it on the ground. She seems apologetic.

Then like 10 minutes later, her husband shows up, sits two seats away, and tells her she sat in the wrong seat. LOL! ... I did not return my belongings to the cursed seat. Also, it turned out to be a cursed and blasphemous film, one of the worst I've ever seen.

Also, it turned out to be a cursed and blasphemous film, one of the worst I've ever seen.

By any chance was it Hypnotic?

It probably wasn't Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) despite being a better descriptive fit and arguably better film.

All the seatback screens could display the seat number in large writing during boarding. Those without screens could have a simple placard with the seat number.

Seat number and the passenger's face!

> Flights with no overhead bins at all.

I completely disagree about this one. I'm not checking all my essentials, because there's a good chance the luggage will get lost (esp. if it's an American airline).

The solution for your problem here is that passengers need to get a test and a license: they need to demonstrate that they can very quickly stick their luggage into the overhead compartment and sit down when boarding, and very quickly get up, grab their bag, and start walking down the aisle when disembarking ("deplaning"... ugh). Half the passengers would fail this test every time, so those people should be kept in a separate part of the plane and charged extra for wasting everyone's time.

You can put your essentials under the seat in front of you.

No, you can't: that's for your "personal item". It's big enough for a small backpack with a laptop and a few other things, and that's about it. Certainly not for a couple days worth of clothes and toiletries.

I'm going to disagree with you there. I took a lot of trips on Ryanair recently, and since they charge for overhead bin use, I kept everything under the seat in front of me. I was able to fit everything I needed (toiletries, clothes, laptop) for four days in a backpack under the seat in front of me.

Ok fine, I suppose you can somehow make it fit if you pack only the bare essentials. I don't feel like it though: why should I? I don't fly RyanAir and I can use the overhead bin for free, so that's what I'm going to do. I can usually bring all the luggage I need for my entire trip carry-on and fit it in the overhead bin and under the seat (two bags, one large, one small), so that's what I do.

It's big enough - I've put my backpack filled with a weeks clothes for BOTH my husband and I plus my laptop under the seat in front of me.

>- Flights where no one is a first-time traveller, in fact you must have flown at least 20 times.

Can we expand that from flights to airports? And have 'training airports' for people to learn on?

And a tasering for anyone standing close to the baggage carousel without their bag in sight ready to pick up.

and the ones who leap from their seats the moment the plane touches down.

Also board from back to front. Yes first class has to wait, but it would save so much time. Even if they boarded first class then did the rest of the plane back to front it would speed up loading by like a good 10 minutes most likely.

The airplane would flip

Boarding back to front is one of the worst ways to board and is significantly worse than boarding randomly [1].

[1] https://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2011/pub/fermilab-pub-11-402-ae...

must have flown at least 5 times outside of a holiday weekend for leisure

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