The Items You Should Never Put In An Airplane's Overhead Bin
My wife and I loved the food in Morocco so much that, on our last day there, we signed up for a cooking class. We were so proud of our efforts that we bought a tagine, the cone-lidded clay pot you cook stews in, to recreate the dishes at home. We wrapped it tightly, with what we thought was enough padding to survive the trip home.
It didn’t.
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We carried it on rather than checking it and slid it into the overhead under a jacket for extra protection. When we landed and I opened the bin, the tagine was in several pieces. Someone had jammed a heavy bag on top of it and forced it down to make room. I had taken every precaution I could think of. Once the tagine went into the bin, I had no control over what happened to it.
Stacey Wallenstein had a similar experience on her honeymoon, when she put a bottle of wine, a gift from her mother-in-law, in the overhead. “We heard POP and said, wow, that sucks for someone,” she said. “That someone was us.” It leaked everywhere.
Neither incident would surprise Jess Strange. As chief customer officer at Southern Cross Travel Insurance, she sees the same outcomes in the claims data. “The overhead locker is a shared space. Bags get moved, heavy items get squeezed in, smaller belongings can disappear from sight and liquids can leak inside a carry-on,” she said.
Electronics get wrecked in the bin without ever hitting the floor. One Southern Cross customer flying between Japan and Bali had their MacBook Pro crushed when another passenger forced a hard-shell carry-on into the bin above them. “The biggest threat to your laptop might not be the baggage carousel,” Strange said. “It might be the stranger trying to squeeze one last oversized carry-on into the overhead locker above your seat.”
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Meera Watts flies from Singapore to Chennai, India, about once a month. On one of those flights, her toiletry bag sat in the bin above her aisle seat, with a 3.4-ounce glass bottle of lavender oil inside it. The landing was hard.
“The impact was strong enough that the overhead bin directly above row 14 popped open on touchdown,” Watts said. “My bag fell straight down and struck the passenger seated in 15C, directly below me, hitting her on the shoulder. The glass bottle inside my bag shattered from the fall, and a shard of glass cut her forearm. The cut bled enough that the flight crew stopped what they were doing and applied direct pressure with bandages from the onboard first aid kit right there in the cabin, before we even reached the gate.” The passenger needed four stitches.
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An injury like that raises another question: Who is responsible? Joseph Gutheinz, a lawyer, former Army aviator and former FAA civil aviation security agent, has handled a case involving an overhead bin injury. His client was sitting beneath an overhead bin when a small, heavy briefcase slid off a suitcase during slight turbulence and struck him. “It was a head injury and we settled out of court,” he said. “The seat belt sign was illuminated but not enforced.”
But falling luggage is not Gutheinz’s biggest concern. “The most dangerous items you might find on a plane are things that might cause a fire or explosion,” he said. Power banks are among the items airlines have specifically restricted because of that risk. New rules from the International Civil Aviation Organization, in effect since March 2026, limit passengers to two power banks and prohibit recharging them in flight.
Airlines have gone further on where they can be kept. United banned power banks from overhead bins in March after one ignited in an overhead bin on an Air China flight. American and Delta now have similar restrictions, requiring power banks to be kept where passengers can reach them.
Keeping them within reach matters if a battery starts to fail. Srinivasa Vanjari, a computer engineer who tests consumer hardware and writes about batteries, flags the detection window as the critical issue. “Thermal runaway announces itself before it ignites, by swelling, by getting too hot to hold comfortably, sometimes by a sweet solvent smell as the cell vents. Every one of those signals needs a person within arm’s reach to catch it. Three feet above your head, behind a closed bin door, under somebody’s coat, the first sign anyone gets is smoke,” he said.
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“The part passengers can act on happens before the airport,” Vanjari said. “Put the power bank on a flat table and press one corner. If it rocks, the cell has swollen and it should not be on the plane at all, bin or no bin.”
The rules are clearer for power banks than they are for most other items. “It is not about telling travelers they can never put a laptop or camera in the overhead locker. Sometimes that is the only practical option,” Strange said. She recommended padded sleeves or protective cases, keeping electronics away from the top of the bag where they can get crushed, and packing liquids in a separate waterproof pouch.
Wildlife photographer Johan Siggesson spends much of the year traveling. “The general mistake I see many passengers making is assuming that because something fits in the overhead compartment, it is safe to place it there,” he said. “Fit does not equal safety.”
Kyle has a simple rule. “If I couldn’t easily replace it during the trip, I don’t put it in the overhead locker,” he said.
My tagine sits on a shelf at home now, glued back together. It never cooked a single stew.
