<font color=SeaGreen>WSJ article about "Airsickness Bags."
October 4, 2000
Airsickness Bags Become Carriers
For Small Pets, Airplane-Size Drinks
By SUSAN CAREY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Last year, Jim Novak, a marketing manager for a music distributor, planned a
party for 200 record-store owners and radio-station brass in Detroit. The band
Foo Fighters had a new CD out, featuring a song called "Learn to Fly," and Mr.
Novak needed an angle. So he dressed the caterers as flight attendants and
handed out the CDs in airsickness bags.
Those familiar bags are still sitting there in front of you when you fly. But
today they are seldom used for their original purpose, enduring instead as a
strange artifact of travel culture that just won't go away. While air travel isn't
pleasant for many passengers, nausea is no longer one of the principal ordeals.
Of the 81.5 million passengers who flew on American Airlines flights last year,
for instance, just 15 dipped into the stashes of airsickness medicine kept handy
on planes, according to David McKenas, American's medical director.
Reason to Be Inventive
So why do U.S. airlines still use more than 20 million bags a year? Passengers
instinctively grope for them -- and have come to expect them to be there with
the safety card and the airline magazine. People have many other uses for
them, says Alden Cohen, a recently retired vice president of Packaging
Dynamics LLC's Bagcraft Division in Chicago, the largest airsickness-bag
maker in the U.S. They come in handy as notepaper, finger puppets, eyeglass
holders and even as doggie bags for airline food.
Kevin Cuddeback, a management consultant in Boston, says the waterproof
bags are a dandy way to dispose of his infant's diapers. Jon Austin, a manager
at Northwest Airlines, says he recently learned that the bags, with the addition
of hot water, are great in-flight baby-bottle warmers. And they are good for
carrying wet swimsuits.
Flight attendants swear by them. Kaye Chandler, a longtime Trans World
Airlines attendant, says she and her colleagues use the bags as hot pads, ice
packs and something to put flowers in. Each is large enough, she also notes, to
accommodate eight Jack Daniel's miniatures. Standard size for U.S. bags, in
inches, is 8 1/2 by 4 1/2 by 2 5/8.
Hamster Carrier
Ms. Chandler has used bags to capture small critters during flights, one of
them a little girl's runaway hamster. Ms. Chandler found a praying mantis on
the galley wall while flying to Hawaii. She put it in a bag, threw in some
lettuce, and kept the insect alive until she could set it free in Honolulu.
Police departments like them to hold evidence. Homeowners have been known
to use them as luminarias.
Frank Norick, the curator of aviation history for the San Francisco Airport
Museums, says that in the early days of aviation, half the people on planes
actually did get sick and throw up. So in 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport,
a TWA predecessor that helped pioneer the New York-Los Angeles route,
began loading towels and round, oiled cardboard boxes on its planes. Soon
thereafter, the airline found a better solution: individual wax-lined receptacles
that airline hostesses called "burp bags." Nobody knows who invented them or
claims to be the inventor, according to Dr. Norick, who retired as the assistant
director of the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of
California at Berkeley. They could just be heaved out the window of a plane in
flight, he adds.
In the 1940s, with the advent of cabin pressurization, planes could fly higher
and thus avoid some of the worst turbulence. Even so, stewardesses, as they
were called, used to say that "meals came on in boxes, and went out in bags."
The antinausea medicine Dramamine and Mother Sills Airsickness Pills helped,
too.
On modern pressurized planes with advanced navigation systems, people who
truly need to use an airsickness bag for its intended purpose usually have the
flu or something else wrong with them, not a bad reaction to a bumpy flight.
Air of Indispensability
Still, while airlines have eliminated other amenities -- complimentary playing
cards, meals on some flights -- and though the Federal Aviation Administration
doesn't require airsickness bags, nobody can think of an airline that has
dumped them. "It's like getting stationery or postcards in the hotel room,"
explains Bagcraft's Mr. Cohen. Adds Bill Wivchar, a TWA manager who
bought 1.2 million of them last year: "An airline without bags is like an airplane
without wings."
But they cost airlines money -- a nickel or a dime each -- so sometimes they
are made to do double duty. American Trans Air, which is based in
Indianapolis, prints its bags on both sides with the word "Occupied" in English,
French and Spanish so fliers can hold on to their seats during stopovers.
Southwest Airlines uses them to recruit new employees. Filled with peanuts
and distributed at job fairs, the white bags on one side ask the question: Sick of
your Job? On the other, they pitch "fun and challenging" careers.
Then there are the collectors. Henry Steiner, a branding consultant in Hong
Kong, isn't certain why he started his 270-bag collection. "Some people are
natural magpies and just like to hold on to things," he says. He justified it, at
first, because "I'm interested in a professional way in corporate identity." But
once he got going, Mr. Steiner says, he became fascinated by all the designs to
be found in the single format.
Last year he donated his collection to the museum at the San Francisco airport,
along with a monograph he wrote titled "In Case of Motion Discomfort: The
Golden Age of Sick Bags." Dr. Norick says some of the items are to be
displayed at the airport when its new international terminal opens late this year.
Certified Biggest
The year-2000 edition of Guinness World Records lists Dutchman Niek
Vermeulen as having the largest collection -- 2,112 different bags from 470
airlines, past and present. He says his trove actually consists of nearly 13,000
bags, including duplicates.
A retired investment consultant (he gives his age as "63 plus"), Mr. Vermeulen
divides his time between Europe and Vietnam. He began collecting bags in
1980, he says, because they are "basically the only thing you can take free off
the planes." He says he knows of 80 other collectors. And there are at least
two dozen Web sites devoted to this strange passion. (An interesting one is
vomitorium.co.uk ).
Mr. Vermeulen visits about a dozen memorabilia shows a year and always
wears his "Barfbags Wanted" hat. He says he spent $50 for an exotic Angolan
airline bag. And his latest prize is a pre-1947 KLM Royal Dutch Airlines bag he
got for $20.
The Holy Grail for Mr. Vermeulen and other serious collectors seems to be a
rare American Airways cup used for the purpose, dating back to the early
1930s. One now resides in the American Airlines C. R. Smith Museum in Fort
Worth, Texas. Curator Ben Kristy says he has had calls from people offering
as much as $1,000 for it. But he says it isn't for sale at any price.
Write to Susan Carey at susan.carey@wsj.com
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