I wrote to Samsonite asking if they might launch a case that fitted precisely within that measurement with no extra fittings so that we could cary the maximum amount in the allotted space. They didn't get the clue. They wrote back listing existing cases that are smaller than the limit.
But good news, at lunchtime today, they announced that they will raise the arbritary limit to 56cm x 45cm x 25cm in the morning.
And we are off to fly kites in Austria tomorrow evening.
So we need to pack as many soft kites and lines as we can into that space. Everything is crushable, we just need to get the size and shape right. We decided to make our own luggage.
But we have a dilema. Hard cases and boxes are heavy. Soft bags tend to bulge towards a sphere shape when packed hard.
So we took a leaf out of Peter Lynn's bridling book and built bags with internal bridling. They are as light as possible and they are a bit fiddly to pack round the internal lines, but they provide maximum capacity and minimum weight within the regulation size and shape. They balloon out slightly beyond the regulation guide but with 8kg of kites inside you can squish them a bit to make them fit.
First of all, you need to understand that these bags do not look small. They are bright red and as you can see in the picture with our anonymous model, they are more than sufficient to hide one's modesty:
So, we get to Heathrow.
We didn't show the bags to checkin. We were saving the fun for security.
There was a huge queue to get through security at the entrance to the departure lounge. It stretched all the way across the building. The first official wasn't security at all. They have "information" people in bright yellow sweatshirts with questionmarks on. Clearly, they were the "soft" end of the process, to tell you what would and wouldn't be permitted further on. They had a luggage guage. We were keen to check the bag and they were amused and surprised to see how neatly it fitted:
So we queued for another 20 minutes or so. We were half-way through the zig-zag section when we were singled out by security. They pulled us out of the queue and said that the bags were too big. We dropped the bag into their guage and they were immediately satisfied. They applogised and directed us down a side passage, short-circuting the rest of the queue where we showed our boarding cards and passports.
Next we we put our gear on the conveyor for the x-ray. They immediately objected and refused to let us through. Having proved our legality only 2 minutes before (but round the corner), we protested, stating that the size was ok. The guy sat at the x-ray machine said that the bags should go through the machine so that we didn't hold up the queue but called a supervisor to deal with us.
The supervisor had clearly spent all day dealing with customers who were irate about the rules and was slightly surprised when my first words were "take me to your guage". She clearly expected that the guage would prove that our luggage was too big and that she could then send us back. It was most satisfying to once again drop the bag into the guage and then proceed to the departure lounge, undefeated.
The hand luggage included Neptune (bottom right), 2 small pilots, most of the lines, a 34m tubular tail and all our clothes. The bags did exactly what we needed them to do. They carried a full 8kg of gear each without difficulty and passed the security restrictions at every challenge. In retrospect, it would have been nicer if they had handles, bigger openings with zips and were a colour other than "look-at-me-red".
Andrew@tug.com