Re: Air travel with a Chapman Stick
Hi Gene, great video! I think I would feel safe checking in my instrument in a stuffed hard case following your advice
I actually learned to stuff up inside the case "the hard way" back in 2006. I was flying Stockholm-Boston-San Francisco. I checked in a tenor sax in a hard case as well as a flight case with electronics. At San Francisco airport none of my luggage turned up in the luggage area. Everybody grabbed their trunks and left until it was only me there, waiting... for nothing.
A guard said I could go to a nearby office and ask about it, and so I did. "I'm sorry, Mr, but your luggage has been declared dangerous and taken to a safe area for termination, unless claimed by the owner within 30 minutes". It was only 10 minutes left by then so I ran like crazy and in five minutes I arrived at a huge concrete hall with a sealed-off area, sized like a tennis yard. In the center of that square, I spotted my sax hard case and I jumped over the fence and ran towards it. "Mr, you are not allowed to enter the restricted area!" someone shouted behind me and I yelled back "I'm the owner and I'm claiming my luggage!". PHEW... (a similar nightmare happened in Italy, but then nothing got crushed).
So I got the sax back but the rest of the gear had been sent to Chicago and I was promised to have it sent to me in Santa Cruz (which happened three days later, the night before the first concert was due). When opening the sax case I found out that the case had been thrown around violently and the instrument inside was damaged. With borrowed tools, I managed to fix the damage to fifty percent but that sax is still not as it used to be. Since then I have always stuffed cloths around instruments inside hard shells. Except for once in 2011 when playing for the French radio in Paris because they sent me two tickets, one for me and one for the SG12 strapped to the seat beside me. I don't think that will ever happen to me again
A few years ago I took a bus from Stockholm to Paris to play some lower-profile gigs there and when switching bus drivers in Germany the new guy thought that my SG12 was "too big for you to enter the bus with". That was scary, I had to argue for ten minutes to get clearance (it was in fact 20 mm too long, so I had taken a chance with it). Next week I'm going to play two concerts at nearby churches and I'm so happy to be able to go there by metro and public bus lines. Oh, I just remembered... once at Instanbul airport it took a long time to leave the craft and walk to the (enormous) luggage area. On the other side of the hall, I saw my Grand in its hard case, simply left alone on the floor right among busy crowds of people running by in all directions. Anyone could have just picked it up and walked away.