(Source: TikTok video)
Take it from somebody who flies a lot:
Theorycrafting about the best way to load/unload a plane is pointless.
Bring a bottle of water on your plane. Bring some headphones and make sure they are charged. Make sure if halfway through the flight you even feel a little like you need to pee, do it in flight.
When the plane lands keep your headphones popped in, and chill out until you’re off the plane.
The main reason I like a window seat is because it means I don’t have anyone freaking out beside me that I haven’t stood up as soon as the plane stops rolling. I’m just gonna sit here and read thanks.
To all the people telling OP they’re wrong, you don’t fly enough. The issue isn’t evenly distributed. It’s not like cars in traffic or whatever.
Airlines put the expensive seats in the front. The people who can afford them are usually much older, either traveling retirees or very late career white collar workers who have significant status. They’re the first ones holding up everyone because they take forever to find all the assorted shit (personal item, oversized roller bag, neck pillow, laptop, ipad, lost earbud, etc) they’ve stuck all over the place, which the gate agent/FAs wouldn’t admonish them for because of their aforementioned status. But they’re first class, so the peasants behind them can wait in the bread line.
After they get off (on watching you glare), depending on airline, it’s the fraction of people who are old and not rich, or don’t fly often and aren’t used to all the ritual. They’ll have placed their bag in an overhead that’s 12 rows behind them and demand everyone stop and crowd surf it up or else they’ll just sit there blocking the line.
After them come the young vacation families, you know, the ones who had the screaming baby for the last 6 hours. They couldn’t be bothered to pay for seat selection to save money so one parent is with one kid three rows ahead but needs to coral the kids behind them because the other parent was playing on a Nintendo switch for the whole flight and didn’t try to organize all the kids toys, now lost to entropy, and so the marital spat and bawling (louder now) children begin.
Then there’s you. You fly a lot so you have nothing more than two pairs of underwear and a toothbrush, all safely hidden from the TSA in your prison wallet and ready to go without so much as a nanosecond of notice, along with your phone and airpods to combat the screaming child in front of you. You got 31B, way in the back, after trying to game united’s seat assignment system by checking in only after all but the exit row seats were taken, but someone missed their flight and here you are.
Generally the legacy airlines will have the most old people, but the vast majority of people on them are very used to flying, because they know better than to book a budget airline. It’ll be slow yet ordered.
The budget airlines like united and frontier will be the opposite, lots of young spry 20 somethings, but lots of vacation families that couldn’t afford Delta… I won’t sugar coat it, it’s gonna be a shit storm. The FAs have been contractually required to keep everyone at the very edge of their sanity through the enforcement of a variety of draconian company policies (like turning on all the lights half way through a redeye to scream about some credit card offer), so things are primed for chaos. Lots of shoving and yelling. Everyone’s reviewing the Wikipedia “list of crimes of passion” to see if this qualifies.
Then there’s spirit. Half the people on the flight will be coming down off of something they got on the dark web by the time you arrive at the gate. You’ve already seen at least a liter of blood spilled from various fist fights. Everyone was already up and crushing each other in the aisle long before the captain even briefed the approach. The FAs have locked themselves in the lavs by now and the captain (an FFDO) has barricaded the flight deck with charts and duct tape and is aiming his questionably modded P320 at he door. Welcome to the new season of Hunger Games - Spam Can. You’re on your own, good luck and good hunting.
you should write a book
One other thing is that the people should allow other people who are already ready to walk out pass them before standing and taking out their carry-on. Most times I’ve seen all passanger wait for each row taking out their carry-ons sequentially instead of 10 taking them out at the same time. If everyone would be me with a carry-on it’d take around 5-10m since I only take the aisle when I’m ready to leave and/or there is another person taking out their carry-on in front or behind me.
So the correct way to do it is for people like you to skip the line? People who get up and move forward make me want to go postal. They exude “fuck everyone” energy and they think the fact that I stayed seated a few extra seconds is their invitation to skip line. Fuck that.
It’s not skipping the line, it’s waiting longer until there’s a time where you don’t hold it up and allow others to pass.
When I travel solo, it’s with one shoulder bag I usually just shove under my seat, don’t even need the overhead. I’m instantly ready, but everyone is in my waaaay.
I’ve noticed more and more people taking sooo much stuff with them on board too. Like they think they are pioneers and need a covered wagons worth of provisions to weather the trip from ATL to LAX.
I suppose some of that can be blamed on the airlines for steep baggage fees but holy crap do people try and take way too much junk with them everywhere they go. So they all take 10 min to unpack.
It’s the fucking trolley warriors…they take as much stuff as possible inside the cabin, to avoid checking baggage.
Of course the time they save at the baggage belt, they waste for themselves and everybody else when disembarking the plane.Every time I’ve checked my bags I’ve been called a moron because my bags are going to get lost.
And sadly those people are not wrong, I’ve had my luggage lost twice, and they don’t pay you back for that.
I’ve had my luggage lost twice, and they don’t pay you back for that.
Excuse me?
Most likely, they pay something like $5/lb of lost luggage, which is not nearly enough
I was lucky to eventually get the lost bags instead of a useless payment when my bags were lost
Travel insurance? Regulation? Out of any insurance worth paying for, I think travel insurance is like top of the line. Anything goes wrong while travelling (stolen stuff, lost/delayed baggage/damaged rental car/cancelled flights/etc.) gives me a decent payback. I pay like 120 USD/yr.
Regarding regulations: At least in the EU/EEA we have some decent regulations requiring airlines to reimburse you if they lose or delay your baggage.
Next time I will fly anywhere, I’ll make sure to get that travel insurance, thanks for a hint
I want the safety announcement at the start of the flight to say:
“You are in a flying metal coffin. Now imagine this coffin filling with smoke and fire. This plane only passes safety regulations because we simulated unboarding it with everyone behaving perfectly, leaving all of their crap behind. In an emergency, you MUST leave your stuff behind. Your life depends on it. The lives of everyone around you depend on it. If you see someone trying to take stuff with them, you MUST use whatever level of force is necessary to stop them. Even lethal force is justified. You must be prepared to tear someone to pieces if they don’t leave their stuff behind. The lives of you and your family depend on the asshole in front of you letting their laptop burn.”
That’s the kind of boarding announcement I want to hear!
This is the same line of thinking as, “if everyone drove like me, there’d be no traffic,” (a phrase used exclusively by terrible drivers).
You aren’t in traffic. You are traffic.
Just stop flying altogether, we’re in the middle of a worsening climate crisis. We can’t afford ourselves to fly anymore.
I’ll probably catch shit for this, but I’m going to say it anyway: the normalization of casual air travel was a mistake. I think there is a time and place for it, but it isn’t something that should be done lightly.
There’s an effect I see in situations like this where the people in a big hurried rush end up being slow asses because apparently they don’t care about this working efficiently, they just care about when they can stop waiting.
On a plane these are the people who leap out of their seat and block your row, only to start searching for their bag once it’s their turn to get off the plane.
I see the same from drivers at red lights. If there are multiple lanes waiting to go, and one car has to inch forward every 5 seconds even though they are already way past the line, then in my very limited anecdotal experience there’s like a 90% chance when the light turns green they just sit there for a few seconds after I start going.
one car has to inch forward every 5 seconds even though they are already way past the line
In my limited experience these cars are driven by people so absorbed by their phones that they don’t realize they aren’t fully engaging the brakes.
I think automatic transmissions have conditioned people to sit too far from the pedals.
I just bought an old classic and haven’t driven stick in a decade. After I got everything comfy and adjusted how I wanted I realized something: I couldn’t get the clutch all the way down if I tried, I’m too far away. Same for the brakes.
Power brakes have made us feel as though all we need is the braking power of our toes, but what happens when your ABS pump goes out and you have to use actual force to apply the brakes at 65mph? Do you have the leverage to get those brakes as far down as they need to to stop safely?
If we were all still popping clutches at every red light I don’t think this would be an issue. I think we’d have less distracted drivers too, needing to shift manually keeps a driver engaged with the car and road.
I Wasn’t advocating to ban Automatic Transmissions when this comment started, I am now.
Seeing the crowd of people squeeze off the Airplane like a tube of toothpaste only to all congregate around baggage claim is the same energy as passing aggressively on the street only for you to pull up next to them at the redlight.
I used to fly for work a LOT. At one point it was 2x a week for a year.
I have never once had my bags make it to baggage claim before me, even being the last person off the plane.
You couldn’t get away with just doing a carry on? It would have to be a 2+ week trip for me going through the hell of checking a bag.
I’m guessing the work travel involved merchandise they couldn’t put in a carryon, either due to size or other factors.
of course. bottled water salesman.
Or knives.
If it was 200 clones of me, we would have gotten off the plane before it even finishes taxiing to the gate. We woulda kicked the emergency doors off and inflated those big slides to ride down the moment the tires touch the ground.
“You can’t catch us all!”
They really need to load back to front, then unload front to back, if it was organized it would go so much better. Like announce when each group can stand and get bags and when each can leave.
But how can they sell priority boarding then? Just think for one minute about the poor airline companies! /s