Foreign Airlines Force You To Weigh Carry-On Bags — The Safety Excuse Doesn’t Hold Up

Passengers bring all their belongings onboard planes in the U.S., hoping to avoid checked bag fees. In some parts of the world, like Europe and Australia, that isn’t allowed. They don’t just limit you to a personal item and a carry-on bag, they actually weigh the carry-on – and you’re often limited to just 15.4 pounds (7 kilograms). That includes the weight of the bag itself!

Here’s a passenger on Qantas’s Jetstar who sees staff bringing over scales to the gate to weigh bags, “you ruin broke [peoples] day for a living.”

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Some airlines use these policies to generate fees, and ultra-low cost carriers are even known for paying out financial incentives to gate agents for catching passengers with excess carry on bags (who can then be charged premium fees for having to gate check those bags).

The underlying policies themselves? Completely unnecessary. Safety justifications are obvious nonsense because U.S. aviation isn’t unsafe due to lack of carry-on weight limits with strict enforcement.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the need to weigh carry-on bags.

• It’s not really about overhead bin capacity. While European airlines don’t tend to have the oversized bins that U.S. airlines now do, many U.S. carriers don’t – Delta doesn’t on many planes, Southwest is only just installing them. And carry-on size is the better proxy for bin capacity anyway.

• It’s not really about workplace injuries. Heavy carry-on bags can cause workplace safety injuries, but when was the last time you saw flight attendants lifting passenger bags? There isn’t actually a rash of dangerous injuries happening in the U.S. where bag weight isn’t limited. There are some injuries from carry-ons (it isn’t zero) and there are in fact some in Europe, oto.

• It’s not about ancillary revenue though some airlines offer extra bag weight for a fee, and many offer extra bag weight for business class passengers further suggesting that 7kg isn’t a necessary hard limit. But most airlines don’t sell extra bag weight, so it’s not primarily a revenue tool.

Iberia’s flight attendants union went to court demanding smaller overhead bins or an order declaring they wouldn’t have to close the bins before departure. They did not get either – but did order Iberia to enforce its carry-on weight limits.

The larger bins American Airlines uses, for instance, have an auto lift feature where you simply pull down the bin and it helps raise it up, power assist as it were. That way whomever is closing the bin isn’t actually lifting up the full weight of the bin.

Airlines say weight limits are about bin space, boarding speed and safety but it really isn’t. It’s actually about government regulation.

Australia’s regulator says that standard weights are assumed for passengers, and this does not include carry-on bags. So 7kg is added per passenger to weight assumptions. There, the government isn’t saying 8kg is a danger to the aircraft or flight attendants. It’s simply that this is their method for coming up with a standard weight. It’s not the only way to do it (there’s no safety issue with the U.S. approach to weight and balance), it’s just their regulatory approach.

And 7kg is chosen because that’s the average regulators in Europe found for carry-on bag weights.

The U.S. has airlines develop average weights. Airlines do sometimes weigh passengers to valid their standard assumptions.

Europe has airlines do it with passenger weight and then assume carry-on weight (although this is not the only allowable method).

U.S. airlines can safely operate without carry-on weight limits. Europe and Australia could too! They just adopted a different regulatory approach.