How much can you trust the traveller?

Most airlines still seem to think that peeling the back off a sticky label, looping one end through a bag handle and sticking it to the other end is too mentally taxing for the average traveller.

So while you can check yourself in and print out your own boarding pass online or at a screen in the airport.

Checking luggage remains a highly specialised task for which you must find a person who has been adequately trained.

Lufthansa, at least, seems to have decided to give its passengers the benefit of the doubt. 

At Munich airport, from where I flew to Berlin this morning, you plop your bag on to the weighing-scale next to the check-in screen, put in your details, and it spits out a luggage tag. 

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After you've attached it, the scale, which is also a conveyor belt, shoots the bag into the maw of the baggage-handling system, but not before passing it under an electronic gate that reads the tag. 

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On my first attempt it spotted that I had forgotten to remove the tag from my previous flight, and shot the back bag to me. 

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Having pulled off the old tag, I put the bag back on the scale again—but must have put it on slightly askew, because it gave a different weight reading and the machine thought I had switched it for another bag.

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I had to start all over again. 

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Evidently, Lufthansa not only trusts its passengers to be smart, but has accounted for the stupid and sneaky ones too.

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How advanced, I thought, as I made my way to the gate.

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In fact, how civilised. 

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Things could still have gone wrong. 

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I could have put the tag through a poorly fastened strap, so that it fell off later. 

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I could have forgotten to take off the luggage ticket that is printed with the tag and stick it to my boarding pass (though these days, you almost never need it). 

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But in fact, most of us have seen airline staff do these things so many times that we automatically know how. 

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Instead of treating passengers like children, Lufthansa treats them like adults.

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Funny, though, I thought, after stopping to help a family who had somehow become trapped on the wrong side of another gate when they came off the plane, and were making frantic semaphore gestures through the glass doors to passers-by. 

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I told a Lufthansa person, whose first reaction was, Well, they should stay there. 

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It is forbidden to come out on this floor. 

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Funny how the check-in machine hadn't asked me to scan my passport or any other form of ID—I had just typed in my name and reservation code. 

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And funny, I thought as I waited in line to board, that the gate staff weren't checking anyone's ID either, just their boarding passes. 

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I got on the plane, ruminating that I could have given my name and reservation code to anyone, and they could have taken my flight instead. 

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Now, most of us wouldn't do such a thing. 

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But in these days of heightened security, is that taking trust in the passenger just a shade too far?

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G.L. Berlin