Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathiaspoint | Hacker News Reader

Carry on luggage should just be banned. If it can't fit in your lap the whole flight it's not a valid carry on.

This is really a safety issue. And tbf, you don't need more. I've traveled internationally with just a laptop bag.

Airlines have either lost my checked bag or just stolen from it too many times for me to trust them with my possessions again. Maybe if I was transporting horse manure, or unpackaged glitter.

Every single statistic I’ve seen shows that lost luggage happens around 1% of the time. We fly fairly frequently - on average more than once per month and it’s really not something we think about.

1% means it happens to 2-3 people per flight.

My personal experience is I've had my luggage lost twice in the last 10 years at an average of 6 flights per year, so my personal incidence rate seems to be 2%

It also means that if you fly every week of the year it will likely only happen to you once all year. For the average traveler, it will be more like once in their entire lifetime.

Still sucks when it does happen though.

1% of losing my stuff is very high imho, I wouldn't want to put anything actually important through such a risk.

There is absolutely nothing in my checked bag that would be any more than a minor annoyance if it were lost.

My wife and I literally had everything we owned in 4 suitcases for a year and carryon back packs for our electronics.

We got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases in 2022 and hopped around different cities for a year on planes. Even then, if one of our suitcases had been lost, we would have used the airline reimbursement and just gone shopping.

With every lithium-ion battery needing to go in carryon, and everything in the world having a lithium ion battery, this simply isn't reasonable.

I can't even put my toothbrush in a checked bag anymore.

You can put the toothbrush in your laptop bag. Although I don't know why you're buying toothbrushes with lithium batteries in them. Even if electric toothbrushes made sense that's still a waste of money compared to the disposable ones.

Electric Toothbrush: $70

Cavity Filling: $300

Still having teeth in my 70s: Priceless

And no, it's not just a laptop bag. The list of things with batteries in our daily life is huge, and telling people to skip it just so that you can get on a plane a bit faster isn't reasonable.

Is this true? Granted I usually just deal with using a standard toothbrush when I go on vacation but I have absolutely put my electric shaver and electric toothbrush in my checked bag without issue.

I thought there is now a battery size allowance that allows these to go under the plane.

Having a bag in your lap is a safety issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com