That was an option in the 1950s for infants. They attached a little cot to the overhead — sort of like the changing shelf on a pack and play!

Isn't this basically just putting the kid in a tumble drier whenever you hit turbulence? Did they pad the roof and door as well?

The turbulence is no worse being up high in the plane vs being down in a seat. In the 1950s, NONE of the passengers would have been using seatbelts...

“When an airplane crashes, the safety belt…may become a deadly hazard.”

- Scientific American Dec 1951 “The Dangerous Safety Belt”

"Aviation requirements for basic safety features, including passenger safety belts, were codified in 1972"

- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-airlin...

Concussions hadn't been invented yet, that's why no one wore a helmet back then

You can still do this for infants on some long haul flights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8fphE1v66M&msockid=42557114...

The most profitable way to fill a plane would be to knock everybody out and just pile them up in the fuselage.

You and I should talk :) I've been thinking of this ever since seeing the movie "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone". He uses a sleeping gas on his audience packs them into a moving truck and "magically" transports his audience to a new location. Tada! Basically same idea, but substitute moving truck with jet.

Knocking someone out safely isn't cheap. There's a reason anesthesiologists are so highly paid. Just ask the hostages from Dubrovka Theater [0] how improvising an anesthetic gas can go (spoiler: you'll need a medium/ouija board).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

So then just pile them up without knocking them out.

Can you fit more people in horizontal than if they stood up and you had little straps to hang onto like a subway?

In theory yes because you can use the space at the top that would otherwise be above people's heads. No guarantee they get to their destination alive though.

Once you include space to get people to the restroom though and to allow them to breath during the flight I think you get a higher density while standing vs laying down.

You can just lay them ass-to-mouth and then stack them. Come on, the slave ships and Dutch East India company taught us that one.

Don't forget that some airlines seriously looked at standing "seats" for short hop flights.

The Fifth Element solution!

That's still way too inefficient, it leaves so many gaps and barely tiles the space. As soon as we get our hands on full reconstruction, you can bet the airlines will require everyone to be ground into a slurry and pumped into the fuselage like a huge tank, and get reassembled at the destination.

Only a new airplane. Most planes are designed for a lot of air and couldn't fly with as many people as can physically fit inside. Cargo airplanes carefully watch this factor. As a passenger I've been on airplanes that took off with empty seats even though there were people on standby wanting to get on because with the weather they couldn't fly a full plane.

Imagine waking up on your 20 hour flight to Tokyo early...

People think I'm crazy for saying this but the only thing stopping big corporations from hiring hitmen to just actually murder people to be more profitable is that it's illegal to do so. If it were legal for them to make you put your baby in overhead luggage you bet your ass they'd be doing it if it were profitable.

The current rule only applies to children under 14 years of age. They don't have to ask for teenagers.