That would slow down boarding exponentially. It just takes one or two assholes to need to have flight attendants stationed throughout the entire cabin making sure people use their bins.

Rule of thumb: if you are anything past the first peasant boarding group, look ahead. If things look crowded? Find the first mostly empty bin and just put your bag up there so that you can grab it on your way out. Otherwise you are gambling that there will be an opening closer to where you actually sit which inevitably is five rows behind you.

And that (and lounge access and not needing to manage miles for status) is why I ended up just getting the fancy credit card for my airline group of choice. Priority boarding means it doesn’t matter where I sit: I have “my” bin.

I love that video (and enjoyed the paper) but even the modified Steffen is bullshit. People will inevitably sit in the wrong row (sometimes on purpose, sometimes because they didn’t pay attention what number started that block of seats and can’t tell if “13” in between two rows is the first or second, they looked at the wrong ticket, etc) and it still falls apart for the reason people want to get on a plane sooner than later: Overhead bins are too small for the amount of luggage on a plane and people are monsters who put ALL their bags up there before sitting down.

My understanding is that, in practice, the best model tends to be what Southwest used to do (before everyone figured out how to abuse it). You board by number/group and just sit wherever the fuck you want to. Families group up and as long as you are in teh first half or so you are all but guaranteed your preferred seat type (window/aisle).

Combine that with no large bags (under seat or checked. nothing in between) and you would have a REALLY effective model that all passengers hate.

As long as you aren’t packing that bag to the seams, consider just sliding your feet under the bag.

I tend to be a “1.5 bagger” in that I have a small duffel/backpack in the overhead and my backpack/messenger bag for inflight stuff. And the latter gives me easy access to my steam deck or my kobo but is also more than small enough I can just slide my legs under and get a significant amount of legroom. ALSO has the benefit of making me lean back in my seat which means I don’t care if the person in front of me “reclines”

A buddy of mine is 6’5" and he is just in hell no matter what. Like, anything short of one of the enhanced legroom rows is gonna suck whether he has a bag under the seat or not.

Its almost like the “generations” are mostly arbitrary with a lot of overlap

There is a big difference between having the people who invented something and being the people who families (and companies…) depend on to keep them running. This being about the latter.

Or, at least, in my family, we tended to not tell the engineers at Ampex to get their butts downstairs because dad didn’t understand why the color was off on the football game he recorded last night

Eh. Genx understood how to work a VCR and deal with the rat’s nest of cables behind the TV

Computers are millennials