Why Musicians Hate Airlines
Author: Helen
Fredericton Airport & Air Canada
In spring of 2000 I was flying from Fredericton to Vancouver and needed to take a sax with me to practice with. (I had a show only a couple of days after I was to return from my 3-week vacation.)
To avoid hassles with Air Canada the day of my flight, I took my Pro Tec Pro Pac, contoured tenor sax case to the airport a week before my flight, and asked one of the people working the check-in counter if it would be acceptable as carry-on luggage.
After measuring my case and consulting the regulations manual, the ticket agent told me that the case was alright, and that I could carry it on under Air Canada’s Violin Policy. He printed out a copy of this policy, in the event that I had problems with whatever ticket agent I was dealing with the day of my flight.
A week later, when I went to check in, the same ticket agent happened to be the one to check in my baggage. He affixed a Fragile Pass to my tenor case.
Once I got on the flight, (a Dash 8 plane that was to take me to Montreal) I asked that my case be put in the suit closet. That’s when all hell broke loose.
The flight attendant informed me that my sax was not acceptable cabin baggage. I calmly showed her the Fragile Pass (plainly affixed to the sax case). This did not sway her. She told me I had to “check my baggage”. I then pulled out the copy of Air Canada’s Violin Policy. This had no effect either.
An Over-The-Top Angry Captain
In the meantime, the Captain had come out of the cockpit to see what was going on. I assume he must have been having a bad day, and perhaps had had a fight with his wife, a co-worker, or perhaps someone else before getting to work, because he displayed the worst case of air rage I have ever seen. Thank god, the plane was still on the ground. He started yelling at me in front of the plane full of passengers.
Since neither the flight attendant nor I had raised our voices, his reaction was totally out of proportion to what was going on. I asked him to calm down, and this only got him more angry.
He then called the airport and the ticket agent from Air Canada who had helped me, came out to the aircraft. Then the Captain started yelling at him too. It was simply crazy.
In the end, the Captain grudgingly agreed to have the “luggage” in the cabin, but not in the suit closet. He ripped the sax case from my hands and roughly placed it on the only 2 vacant seats on the aircraft, which as luck would have it, were beside each other.
He then went into a storage closet and got out some heavy strapping. He then proceeded to roughly wrap the strapping around the case and seats to prevent the horn from “becoming a projectile” should the aircraft hit turbulence. Then he added netting over the 2 seats. Talk about overkill… Geez… (Had he just put the freakin’ thing into the suit closet, it wouldn’t have been a projectile either, but whatever…)
Total Humiliation
When I finally looked up and went to take my seat, I saw the entire plane-load of people staring at me. My face must have been about as red as a cooked lobster. Among the sea of faces aboard the flight to Montreal that day, I saw that of our Member Of Parliament, Andy Scott.
I sat right behind Andy Scott on the flight to Montreal, and for the entire flight wondered what he, and the other passengers aboard the aircraft, thought of our Captain’s outburst. Did any of them feel safe with that guy at the controls? I sure as hell didn’t.
I changed planes in Montreal, and got on a 747 or an Air Bus. The staff in Montreal didn’t care about my sax. They didn’t even want to see the Fragile Pass. They just stored the horn for me in the suit closet.
After that incident in Fredericton, I never travelled with a tenor again. I just took an alto with me. No fuss. No muss. No Fragile Pass required. If I needed a tenor where I went, I got one there.
Chicago Airport & Baggage Handlers For United Airlines
Fast forward 8 years, and now we have another musician from the Maritimes with a airline horror story to tell. However, he has done something brilliantly creative: he has written a song and released a video on YouTube that tells the story of what United Airlines did to his Taylor guitar.
Dave Carroll co-fronts the Halifax-based Sons of Maxwell, and his story goes like this…
In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.
This video was uploaded to YouTube on July 6, and at the time of writing, has had 907,188 views already! I’m thinking this song resonates with a lot of the air-travelling public. It certainly did with me!
Update: When I went to publish this article (a mere 11 hours after writing it) the number of views was 1,384,878. That means that in just over 11 hours, there have been 477,690 more views of this YouTube video. That’s really amazing. I can’t imagine that Dave Carroll believed his lowly little song would be this popular.
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