How to carry on your guitar on board an airplane [Every time.]
If you want to keep your guitar on board and safe while traveling, and prevent it from being checked. Read this.
I fly for gigs about 40 dates per year. I've been doing that for like 9 years. So thats over 600 flights with a guitar. Let me tell you - There's a few things you should know before putting your grandpas pre war Martin in a soft case and handing it off to the good people at the ticket counter.
Before flying with your guitar, consider the following: is your guitar very valuable? Will you be devastated if it breaks? Is there another guitar you can use at your destination? If you answered yes to any of these, reconsider traveling with your instrument. Your guitar has a decent chance of being damaged on a commercial flight.
Ok so you're going to bring your stratocaster on a fly date. You really don't want to have to check it and let it come out of baggage claim. That's the worse case scenario. You want to get it on board. Here's a checklist of things you'll want to do to keep it safe:
1) Travel with your guitar and your guitar only, in a small thin (but strong) case. I always need to bring my guitar and a roller case (which has pedals, cables, tuners, extra strings, slide, clothes, books, laptop for making beats etc). This leads me into a lot of predicaments because I’m in a grey area of baggage limits. Unfortunately I need to carry all this stuff and I really hate checking my luggage and having to add a possible hour of waiting every weekend. That really adds up and it also increases the chance of letting the airline lose my bag. So… Assuming you need to at least carry a guitar and a backpack in general you should be ok, but not always. Anytime you have a guitar and another item you will set off peoples radars. Keep reading… 2) Avoid the ticket counter when you get to the airport. Check in online, print or use your phone for your ticket and walk straight to security. With certain airlines, like American Airlines at LAX or United at SFO, if the staff at the ticket counter see you with two items they will force you to check one. 3) Board Early. As the plane gets filled, they will start forcing passengers to gate check. This means your guitar will either be gate checked or maybe they’ll grab it at the gate, but it will later come out of the meat grinder that is baggage claim. You can try to politely ask the ticket counter person for an earlier boarding position, but as airport employees get more and more aggro, sometimes when I’ve asked that they’ll automatically tag my bag, which is so lame! So I stopped doing that. But you could try it. 4) Ok so you have two items and you are in a late boarding group. Things are looking bad. They are starting to tag everyones bag. Do you have a friend without a bag or just a purse? Ask them to carry your bag on board… Oh, you don’t have a friend? Keep reading… 5) Alright dammit they caught you and have tagged your roller bag (you were smart and decided to bring your guitar ON BOARD) and you let them gate check the roller bag. (As of 2019 on Southwest Airlines, they are making me guitarists leave their boarding position at the gate to go to customer service and tag bags - This is the worst!) What do you do? Well firstly, you carry it down the jet bridge. Not them. So if you are in an earlier boarding position but they still made you tag something, you can simply walk down the jet bridge, take the tag off and get it on board. There are often so many bags that they won't remember yours. This is a little dicey and I haven’t been busted yet, but it definitely makes my heart race every time. There’s almost always room, so I don’t know why they force us to check guitars that easily fit in the closet. 6) Small plane? Flying Salt Lake to Tahoe? The Breedlove Tour Mate Travel Bag and larger cases ALWAYS fit in the overhead. 7) No overhead space? Cases always fit in the closet. There’s tons of room on these planes. They tell you no until you show them it fits.
8) Ok you’ve tried every trick and exhausted every avenue. They are forcing you to check your guitar at the gate. A gate check is when they tag your guitar at the gate, put it in the cargo before take off, and then bring it back to you on the jet bridge. Therefore it is the last thing put in the belly if the plane, and the first thing taken out. Ask the gate personel where the guitar is going to emerge upon landing & double check the stub they give you. Sometimes they will tag it at the gate, but when you arrive it will come out of baggage claim which is bad news. This is why you MUST loosen the strings. (Remember in fight club where they call baggage handlers "throwers"?). Even worse, on a layover, your instrument could be short checked, which means it ends up at baggage claim at your layover airport.
9) Be polite to the staff and do what you can to get in line and onboard early. Your chances of getting your guitar in the cabin are determined by how much room there is in the overhead bins, and how well you treat the airline employees. I'll just say this though - some flight attendants are really nice and some are really mean. Don't sass them cause they can throw anyone off the plane. *** I have heard musicians say they were able to get their instrument onboard by waving the D.O.T. law in the face of the airline employees. But, I have also personally seen airline employees force an EMT to check a bag containing $30k of medical gear (which is against the law). This EMT told me that he could legally 'delay the flight' for this violation. But after arguing, they checked his bag, and he sat his ass on the plane. The truth is that there is always room for your guitar inside the cabin. But the reality is that when the flight is full and behind schedule, a cranky airline employee won't allow your guitar onboard, even if it is your legal right to check for a spot. If you want to reduce issues - Use a small streamlined semi soft hard case like a the Breedlove Tour Mate. I don’t work for them. I just like this case. The bigger the case, the less likely it's gonna get onboard. I believe that you get the most protection from a firm case with padding - not a hard case. In a semi hard case if it drops, there is shock absorption that you wouldn't get from a hard case. If it's crushed by a heavier bag, it will give you protection that you wouldn't get from a very soft case. This is my personal, unscientific belief - I am not a rocket scientist . (If you always check your guitar for some reason, you will want a hard molded flight case). I recommend you don't fly with a Gibson. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Gibsons, due to their unique design and stress points have a higher chance of cracking at the neck than a fender electric with a bolt on neck. In summary - I have a developed a simple approach. I have 3 guitars that are suitable for fly dates, which I always keep in my Breedlove Tour Mate Case. They are inexpensive, great sounding guitars with upgraded parts. 90% of the time I get them onboard. The rest of the time, I loosen the strings and hand them off for a gate check. If one breaks, I'm not gonna cry. I've experienced a couple short checks, but no broken guitars yet. Fingers crossed! If you're interested in earning over 100k with just your guitar Book a consultation with me. One last thing - If your guitar is really valuable and you want guarantee it's safety, buy a seat for it. Then the question will be, what does your guitar want to drink? Hiyo!