Danielle Booker's plane was coming into Denver when the bumps started. She could tell this was going to go badly. She checked her seat pocket and found no bag. Her seatmate had none either. Neither did the next passenger over, or the man across the aisle. “I thought I was gonna have to barf in my purse,” she said.
A bag from an airport convenience store saved her just in time. David Marcelis and Alison Sider tell her story in the Weekend Journal's A-hed. Booker is a 32-year-old human-resources manager from Atlanta. That was an April flight. A few months later, it happened to her again. These days she keeps dog-poop bags in her purse for every flight. “I just don't want to leave it up to them to provide one,” she said.
Supposed to be in every seat
Major U.S. airlines and flight attendants say the bag still belongs in every seat pocket. Some admit it isn't always replaced right away. Cleaning is often done by outside crews. ABM, a big cleaning contractor, says its teams check for bags when they clean cabins, usually overnight. Bags can be restocked between flights if the crew asks. The flight attendants' union says how often that happens depends on the airport and the ground time. Some attendants say the bags leak and the quality has slipped. In a real emergency, they reach for a trash bag.
Passengers have their own theories. Short turnarounds. People who stuff the bags with trash. A TikTok hack that uses the bag to prop a phone on the tray table. Dan McCarthy, 38, an underwriting specialist from Austin, uses the hack on most flights and says he always puts the bag back. He can't recall a single Southwest flight without one. Southwest says its appearance technicians check every night. Liah Honeycutt, a 31-year-old motion designer from Atlanta, flies about once a month and finds a bag about half the time. She brings her own now. So does Enrico La Cava, 35, an engineering manager from Paris, because his kids get carsick. On a recent flight to Rome a passenger a few rows down got sick after takeoff. Nobody knew what to do. La Cava got up and handed over his bag. “The only bag available was ours,” he said.
Our read
Our read, Insurance and Consumer Protection (M11). The airline says the bag is supposed to be there. The contractor says it checks overnight. The union says it depends on the airport. Everyone's right, and the seat pocket is still empty when you need it. That's how most systems work. They're built to be fine on average. You get sick on one specific flight. The fliers in this story figured out the fix, and it costs about nothing. Carry your own. Self-insurance works best for the small, likely, cheap stuff. A bag in a purse. A spare charger. A few months of expenses in a plain savings account.
Here's the line in your plan this touches. The emergency fund is your barf bag. Check this week that it's a real account with real money in it. A credit card limit doesn't count. Neither does a brokerage account you'd have to sell from in a bad week, or a hope that your employer would float you. If it's thin, name the number and set up the transfer. You don't find out the pocket is empty until the turbulence starts. We'd rather look with you now, while the air is smooth.