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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

this effect seems to be especially true in airports. they seem to particularly inspire dumb herd behaviour. perhaps there's an increase in perceived danger leading to a stronger desire for safety in numbers?

another example: queueing to board the plane. other than to fit in, why on earth would I stand there and compete to spend more time in a sweaty uncomfortable seat packed with 400 other people? plus, if you get on last, you can take advantage of empty rows before anyone else

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The reason becomes apparent when you take a carry on bag and find yourself desperately searching for somewhere to put it in an overhead bin, but there is none. You boarded too late and everyone ahead of you stole your allotted space.

NOW you have to check in your carry on. And waste time waiting for your bag at the baggage claim. If it even makes it. Your bag has much higher chance of being lost if checked in late.

Yup this. I'm not a herd person but I love boarding first so I can tuck my bag away. It means the worry of that is gone.

And I actually like sitting in my window seat a lot more than at the gate.

Pretty funny use of the word "stole" in this context. The space being above a particular doesn't make it that seat's space any more than the public parking space on the street in front of your house makes it yours. And I've been on probably 8 or 10 flights this year and every time they said carry-ons checked at the gate are returned planeside upon arrival; not once have they been sent to baggage claim.

>The reason becomes apparent when you take a carry on bag

your unreason will become apparent when you check that bag and stroll completely unencumbered through the vast distances twixt curb and plane (x2 departure and arrival)

baggage claim really doesn't take that long, and you can come up with something zen to do for 5 or 10 minutes, make a phone call or two, talk to family or friends. Life is better when you stop inconveniencing yourself and creating a rat race when there isn't one. Let everyone around you fight over the overheads.

I agreed until I lost thousands of dollars of shit in a checked bag TWICE in one lifetime

The crazy thing is, the chance of someone dying is about the same as the chances of you losing your checked bags.

> baggage claim really doesn't take that long

Sure. Just recently picked up my partner from SFO on a late night arrival. It tooke THREE HOURS for the bags to start arriving on the belt. Who knows why. Zero information given to the hundreds of angry people standing there. A very miserable time.

Yes, that's not typical, but it happens. If you carry your bags, it can't possibly ever happen.

Actually the opposite is true. When you gate-check your bags, they are handled carefully and go directly into the plane. Sometimes even into a corner of the passenger area. Parents routinely gate-check strollers, and it’s rare to see one get lost.

Also, gate-checked luggage is given to you at the gate when you land. So no baggage claim.

> When you gate-check your bags, they are handled carefully

Spend some time at the window seats at the gate looking at earlier flights and how gate-checked luggage is handled.

It gets thrown down this chute that drops hard some 20ft to the ground. It also gets very carelessly thrown in there, so a bunch of the bags miss the chute and just drop straight down to the concrete. If you had anything other than clothes in there, ouch! You'll get back a back full of destroyed fragments.

My intuition is that, in addition to what you mentioned and at least for longer flights, some people have residual effects from the mild hypoxia at altitude when they're on the ground in their destination airport.

I, at least, sure as hell feel dumber for the rest of the day after a six hour flight. Usually that's accompanied by a fairly debilitating headache.

alcohol always seems to hit me harder on a plane, and afterwards

I can't drink during/before flights at all, it destroys me

Commercial airline cabins are pressurized to at most 8k feet; there are no hypoxic effects at that altitude, at least not on decision-making. You don't need continuous oxygen on the flight deck until either 14 or 14.5k feet (in the US, EU might be slightly different). The FAA is dogmatic and wrong about a lot of things, but if there was even the slightest bit of evidence showing decreased decision-making or cognition at lower altitudes, they'd be requiring oxygen immediately, economic consequences be damned.

You can watch your blood oxygen dip when flying, I don't know how significant the effect is on performance but as a sea level dweller there seems to be some observable difference in the data.

Too much CO2 is known to lower IQ scores significantly, for the duration of exposure.

> this effect seems to be especially true in airports. they seem to particularly inspire dumb herd behaviour. perhaps there's an increase in perceived danger leading to a stronger desire for safety in numbers?

There's an increase in potential negative consequences. More people with guns, more chance for "security" to pick on someone they don't like. If you go off on your own and you're right, you don't gain much - if everyone gets on the wrong plane or goes through the wrong gate or what have you, there's not much they can do. If you go off on your own and you're wrong, you might get beaten up, kicked off your flight, held without charge until you dehydrate, banned from the country...

Some people live in a scary world. I would think it's quite stupid to be worried about this when the worst that could happen is missing a flight, which would not happen anyway if you pay attention to your surroundings.

That's not the worst that can happen, not by a long way. You have very few rights in an airport, in practice if not in theory.

Have you looked up crime rates in airports or what gives you this idea that it's a dangerous place? Unless you're digging up dirt on Putin and flying through Russia or some outlier situation like this, nothing is going to happen.

It's not a crime when the authorities do it, sadly. I've seen plenty of anecdotes here and elsewhere of people being detained without access to legal representation and without even being informed of what they've supposedly done wrong. If you're denied entry to a country then you have no right of appeal or anything.

The danger factor needs to be weighted between probability of the event and severity of the event. The probability of the things you describe are near zero.

> There's an increase in potential negative consequences. More people with guns, more chance for "security" to pick on someone they don't like. If you go off on your own and you're right, you don't gain much - if everyone gets on the wrong plane or goes through the wrong gate or what have you, there's not much they can do. If you go off on your own and you're wrong, you might get beaten up, kicked off your flight, held without charge until you dehydrate, banned from the country...

Umm wut? You live in North Korea or something?

Here in Europe things are pretty mellow, there was a while after 9/11 when the security was pretty heavy-handed but luckily things are back to normal and we are now again innocent until proven guilty. We have things like rights here.

But beaten up because you walk around in the wrong public area of an airport?? That did not happen even then.

I'm European. Even pre-9/11 you'd get stopped and made to leave for saying the wrong thing. Post- we've got a guy getting jailed (famously the first person jailed for an act without criminal intent, because apparently airports get an exception from basic protections) because he went for a smoke and some people were scared of his luggage, and the person getting held without charge and without any water was also my country.

> But beaten up because you walk around in the wrong public area of an airport??

Sure, but if you take a wrong turn you're suddenly in the private area, and even if there weren't any signs, well, why did you wander off on your own, no-one else did.

I've personally avoided missing flights by breaking from the crowd in airports

> why on earth would I stand there and compete to spend more time in a sweaty uncomfortable seat packed with 400 other people?

Wonder if you have flown in recent years?

Flights are now set up so that the last several groups who board have zero space for carryone luggage. So if you board after all the space is gone you are in for a very bad time. For a while it started to become an unspoken rule, and now they even announce it on the loudspeaker: if you are in group N or above (N depends on airline) you won't have any space left.

My “rational”answer is that I don’t mind standing, so it’s worth the benefit of guaranteeing space in the overhead bin near my seat, and I like being first to my row.

Plus I almost always have a window seat, so getting there first is the most convenient for myself and my row mates. I don’t do this on flights that don’t seem full.

No need to involve hypoxia, which should subside quickly at sea level. People are tired, stressed, and many have been drinking on the plane.

In Europe most people don't really drink anymore on flights because it's no longer free on most airlines.

Which is a really good thing IMO.

These days it makes sense to queue up and make sure your bag don't get checked, but I had the same initial observations.

or maybe people are in a new place and processing a totally foreign environment? Maybe theyre stressed/tired from flying? Not thinking because theyre in a rush? Its not that hard to find reasons for why people might make mistakes in an airport.

> another example: queueing to board the plane. other than to fit in, why on earth would I stand there and compete to spend more time in a sweaty uncomfortable seat packed with 400 other people? plus, if you get on last, you can take advantage of empty rows before anyone else

what? people are following direction, and the way the plane boards is actually important to how fast it loads, so youre messing with that because its a mild convenience to you and you consider that intelligent behaviour?

cpg grey has a video on this i suggest you take a look https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo?si=jv00xanestDfodPt

>what? people are following direction, and the way the plane boards is actually important to how fast it loads, so youre messing with that because its a mild convenience to you and you consider that intelligent behaviour?

What direction? The only time there were more directions than just "priority" vs "non priority" was on my flight to Korea a few years ago. Most smaller flights in Europe, sadly, do not do that.

Full service airlines board by section by direction of the gate agents pre-flight. The video explains why its important for those airlines

I've watched that video when it came out, but my point is that you can fly monthly between european countries without ever coming across proper boarding procedures. Don't get me wrong, it infuriates me, but this is the sad reality we live in.

Even on the flight from Helsinki to Bangkok there was only priority vs non-priority distinction, even though the tickets had different seating groups. Could have saved us all some convenience, but no, we all had to board the plane very chaotically.

Which is why I am usually the last one to go to the boarding, I can chill on comfy seat for 20-30 minutes instead of standing in chilly or boiling hot weather/boarding tunnels.

if this had been the case even once on the tens of flights I've taken in recent years, then I would have participated in that. in reality however, boarding is almost exclusively two naturally-formed queues, priority and not

the tone of your comment sounds to me like suppressed embarrassment. it's okay, you're not an idiot for queueing for boarding, it's just not a behaviour I'm going to participate in for no real reason

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