Airfare alone isn’t a great indicator of price, since airlines have been reducing benefits—luggage generally is an upcharge now, whereas it used to be built into the ticket price.
But then again, these short flights are often CHEAP. Even in “first”, where the perk is…a wider chair, sitting near the front and better snacks i suppose.
Example: I can fly from NYC to Chicago for $80 in economy. In first it’s about $200 on delta. I certainly wouldn’t expect free access to a good lounge with decent food for free at that price. It would be hard for me to be disappointed as a flyer at those prices.
It's $300 but the Peak Design backpack is amazing. It has one massive compartment which makes it easy to efficiently cram stuff in there. https://www.peakdesign.com/products/travel-backpack?Size=45L...
Most backpacks seem to compete on maximizing pocket count which isn't good for tetris packing.
e.g. If you max out the allowed dimensions with United you get a 45.08L carry on and a 23.65L personal item.
And most "cheapest tickets" now no longer include a carry on bag, only a personal item.
2. Flights get slowed down for everyone when people are exceeding the underseat bag size limits - sometimes the bags do get checked in the metal sizers at the gate, which causes obvious slowdowns, and 300 passengers with 45L underseat bags are going to take significantly longer to board/deplane than 300 passengers with <24L underseat bags.
3. I'm skeptical that you can actually fit a 45L bag under plane seats without ever inconveniencing other passengers. Seats are pretty tight and it's pretty easy for a larger bag to push your legs sideways so they cross the midpoint of the armrest. And various planes don't have dividers between every under-seat area, so if your bag is oversized it's easy for your bag and/or feet to spill into your neighbour's under-seat area. But maybe you're small or very disciplined and are able keep your body and belongings in your own seat area, I've (probably) never sat next to you, so can't say for sure.
Although, this seems to apply only to hardshell wheeled cases - I walked aboard with my backpack & shoulder bag without any issues, and fit my backpack into an overhead compartment and shoulder bag under my seat with no problems.
But next time, I may try to pack everything into a single backpack, and re-configure things once I'm in my seat so I have easy access to a smaller subset of stuff in my shoulderbag instead.
I don't think this is that unreasonable. Gate staff can look around and count how many bags people have, and they know how much space is in the overhead bins. Not to mention that nearly every flight will run out of overhead space, so they might as well start demanding people check bags sooner rather than later.
Though the overhead bin space probably wouldn't be as bad if airlines were better about enforcing size limits. So often, a roller bag is just an inch or two too tall, so has to be placed lengthwise in the overhead bin, making it take up space that could have fit 2-3 bags.
If I see that happening and I'm traveling light enough, I've merged my backpack into my duffle bag so that I have one single "personal item" for under the seat in front of me. Nobody ever seems to care that it doesn't cleanly fit.
But jeez, forcing check-ins during Group 1 is worse than I've ever seen it. I guess it's more and more popular to use two hard-shell carry-ons and put them into the overhead compartment. And I guess the airline just sees it as an incentive for you to buy a more expensive seat.
I've mine daily for 5-10 years, they're great.
There's even gems like "no carry ons" and "no airline miles" tickets now. They cost the same as the lowest fares last year.
And at the end of the day, operates at a pre-tax[1] profit margin of 5% (in a good year), or 0% in a bad one.
If all airlines became altruistic non-profit entities tomorrow that only exist to serve their customers and nobody else, your ticket prices wouldn't drop more than ~$10-20.
[1] Post-tax, it's at 2.5%, but I'm not qualified to get into whether or not there's Hollywood accounting going on.