A no-stow zone

Question: I was on a Southwest flight recently, and the flight attendant said that folks could not put their laptops in the seatback pocket. Why not?

Elizabeth Barnes

Sparks, Nev.

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Answer: Consider the glove box in your car. It was designed to hold the operating manual and maybe the occasional work order for maintenance or repair. It wasn’t designed to hold an accordion file of grocery story coupons and recipes, two tire gauges (in case one breaks, you know), a bottle of Excedrin, a “break the window if you’re drowning” hammer, hand lotion, 65,000 napkins and a copy of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”

One day, that little compartment in my car is going to shout, in whatever language plastic uses, “I can’t take it anymore!” And then it will explode like a rocket on the Fourth of July.

Likewise, a Southwest seatback pocket is designed to hold safety information, a magazine or two and an airsick bag -- in total, about 3 pounds of stuff. Unless you’re using one of the lightweight netbooks that we wrote about in last Sunday’s Travel section (latimes.com/netbooks), that seatback pocket isn’t strong enough for a laptop computer.

But it’s also not safe enough, no matter what you’re computing with, and that may be the bigger issue. A seatback pocket is not an approved storage space.

In the end, storage is really all about safety, which is what flight attendants are charged with.

Federal Aviation Administration regulations dealing with what we can put where “essentially say that each article of carry-on baggage must be stowed under a seat or in a compartment that’s placarded for its maximum weight and able to provide proper restraint for anything that’s stored inside it,” said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the FAA.

The seatback pocket isn’t one of those places.

And a seatback pocket also isn’t a trash receptacle, so if you have litter, give it to the flight attendant. Putting your used tissues, candy wrappers and packets of mayo in there slows the cabin cleaning process.

That’s important on quick turnarounds, especially for Southwest, where the average ground time is 25 minutes. That may sound like a luxury of time, but in just shy of half an hour, passengers disembark, the cabin and lavatories are cleaned, the seatbelts are arranged back on the seats, the plane gets its provisions and the new passengers get on and find a seat, said Marilee McInnis, Southwest spokesperson.

Leaving your discards behind is, well, a bunch of rubbish.

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