I was checking in at Brussels for the British Airways hop back to Heathrow, then home to Vancouver. Unfortunately they’ve suddenly started enforcing the long-ignored policy that no carry-on shall exceed 6 kg in weight. My ordinary roll-on full of ordinary clothes and so on came in at 14 kg (my briefcase, on the other hand, bulges with electronics and has the specific gravity of lead, but they didn’t weigh that). So, I was going to have to check it. Except for, British Airways is OneWorld and Air Canada is Star Alliance, so they couldn’t check it through to Vancouver, I’d have to recover it at Heathrow. Except for, I had barely two hours at Heathrow and had to change terminals, which just doesn’t leave any slack for doing the luggage dance. This looked serious and, in a soft-voiced, polite way, I made a scene. Three phone calls later, they decided to allow me to carry it on board. Six kg is, frankly, ridiculous. This is yet another step in the ongoing campaign by the air travel industry to make the experience supremely unpleasant. I expect their executives all to end up in jail when the videoconferencing boom hits and it turns out they’ve been accumulating big equity holdings.
