This viral video of a baggage handler yeet-ing guitars at an airport is both shocking and not surprising at all.
It seems as though as long as airline travel has existed, the bags of passengers haven’t exactly been handled with care. If you are like me, you do your best to only ever have carry on bags. But some trips require the dreaded decision of checking a bag, and for most artists and musicians, they have no choice but to check their instrument if they are hopping on a bird to get one from gig to the next.
I’d imagine this video below is a recurring nightmare for those types of people.
Footage allegedly captured by a traveler at Los Angeles International Airport showed a baggage handler taking guitar after guitar out of the luggage trailer and tossing them with reckless abandon onto the tarmac. And he wasn’t just dropping them… he was actually giving them a bit of a chuck. And while the one that sailed had a hard shell case, many others were in gig bags.
The person filming from the plane couldn’t believe what they were seeing, and got their camera out to capture this TikTok:
“I hope your guitars are okay.”
@goyamariacookie I hope your guitars are ok #LAX #losangeles #airport #guitartok ♬ Cumbia Buena – Grupo La Cumbia
That’s crazy behavior… and I hate to judge the entire baggage handler community based on just this one video, but this is probably par for the course for a lot of them.
Artists and musicians are always complaining about their instruments being mishandled when they check them, and this video is proof that not much is changing in that department. And it’s gotten a lot of social media users upset. They’ve flooded the comment section with replies like these:
“That should be a fireable offense. That’s just egregious.”
“Looks more intentional than careless.”
“He’s definitely doing that on purpose… it takes more energy to launch something than to let it drop.”
“$55 for checked baggage and we get this.”
“This makes me so mad. I don’t care if it’s a $100 guitar or $5,000 guitar be respectful of others property.”
“As a musician, this hurts my heart. Dreams and love are in those cases!”
“If you hate your job that much, don’t work there. People work hard for things and it’s unfair to have them thrown around like that.”
That’s certainly a fair thing to say.
You might be sitting there thinking, “How could we, the people, force upon change to the airline industry?” Well, we might have to follow a blueprint that was laid out by a musician named Dave Carroll over 15 years ago.
You might remember this story, as it is one of the earliest examples of something “going viral.” Carroll was flying with his band on United Airlines, and during his flight, he noticed that the baggage handlers loading the plane were recklessly throwing around he and his bandmates’ equipment.
So he wrote a song called “United Breaks Guitars,” filmed a music video, and uploaded it to YouTube.
People who related to the aggravating experience of dealing with the airline industry kept sharing and sharing the music video, quickly amassing the clip millions upon millions of views. To this date, it’s racked up a whopping 30 million in viewership.
But the best part about it is that as the song went more and more viral, the stock price for United Airlines skewed farther and farther away from cruising altitude. By that, I mean that the stock price decreased a total of 10%, costing shareholders an incredible $180 million.
And it all could have been avoided if, you know, United Airlines did their job correctly. Whether that was the baggage handlers handling the luggage with more care, or the airline’s customer support actually supporting a customer. Instead, they chose to do neither, and paid the price when Dave Carrol dropped this BANGER of a song.
Where are you Dave Carrol? Are you out there? This latest TikTok video proves that the world needs you again:
