A New Era--for Baggage Anyway

For men who expend a lot of effort promoting tourism, the 400 airline executives attending the International Air Transport Association's annual meeting in Cannes have proved to be poor tourists. Ignoring the pleasures of the Riviera, the IATA people have for two weeks been meeting morning, noon and night behind closed doors. Why the urgency? "This is the most important traffic conference in history," says IATA Director General Knut Hammarskjold, nephew of the U.N.'s late Dag. "It takes place at the beginning of the era of real mass international air travel."

The upcoming generation of jets, designed to carry more than twice as many passengers as current equipment (see following story), poses all sorts of challenges for IATA's 104 member airlines. Nonetheless, the conference, which will set passenger traffic policies for the next two years, was moving at piston-plane speed. In all likelihood, the conferees will be embroiled for another month in wading through an agenda that runs to 18 volumes and covers some 2,000 proposals involving routes, possible surcharges for supersonic-transport tickets and ways to meet growing competition from non-IATA charter airlines. The outcome of the major issue--fares--remains unsettled, but the U.S. lines are given little chance of winning their long-sought reductions. Other carriers, complaining of higher costs, are firm for the status quo.

At this point, about all that seems certain is that the airlines will heed Hammarskjold's urging that they "do something positive about baggage." Travelers will second the motion. Because individual weighing-in of luggage consumes too much time at airport counters, IATA is of a mind to scrap the weight limit in favor of an allowable number of pieces. Originally developed before the days of the DC-3, the weigh-in became obsolete with the arrival of the jets, which have vast capacity. But the rules have stubbornly held on because they are profitable for the airlines. Last year passengers paid $80 million in overweight penalties.

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