United Breaks Guitars

[John Coffey]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Dennis R. Brown, DDS]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

United steals Xbox 360s as well. I got one of the first XBox 360s when they came out in November 2006. My wife and I had a trip planned to Japan and then to Hong Kong to see her parents, and we flew United from LAX to Tokyo for out first leg. Because my 360 was new I wanted to bring it with me to play in out hotel rooms during the down times. When we got to the hotel in Tokyo I noticed my bag felt a little lighter. I opened it up, and needless to say, my brand new 360 was gone, along with the few games I had purchased. Also missing from the bag where a few PSP games that I hadn't put into my carry-on bag, and the month supply of pain medication I had brought with me.
I called United, LAX, LAX Police, TSA, and the Department of Homeland Security. It was a joke how little anyone of those organizations cared about my missing property. It was almost like I was talking to people that hear the same call many times each day regarding missing items from luggage. I could understand not giving a crap about the electronics (not really!), but the fact that some took a month supply of heavy-duty pain medications should have concerned at least the TSA or Homeland Security! Sad to say, it didn't phase them in the least.
We had purchased travel insurance for the trip, but the insurance company didn't care either. We didn't get a single bit of reimbursement from anyone, despite the plethora of paperwork we had to fill out. I wanted to have a new 360 so badly, that I ended up buying one in Tokyo. My Japanese was fairly decent at the time, and I was reassured by the dude at the electronics shop that the Xbox 360 I bought there would work with games I bought in the US. Wrong! So when I got back to the US, I ended up buying another 360.
The lesson I learned was to always carry things of value with me on to the plane in my carry-on bag. I also learned that travel insurance is worthless, and the TSA sucks. The karmic justice in this whole affair was that several baggage handlers were busted in an undercover, hidden-camera investigation a few months later. I never got my stuff back though.

[Mako Koiwai]

The lesson I learned was to always caring things of value with me on to the plane in my carry-on bag.

Except when you're flying to away matches they won't let you bring your firearms on board. This has been a problem for our USA Shooting athletes going overseas. Imagine arriving in Spain for the Summer Olympics and finding your highly customized pistols stolen. Those pistols often have handgrips that have been fine tuned over years.

I'm surprised that we don't lose more camera gear when we travel out-of-town to film commercials. In 31 years of doing this, I've only had a 300 mm Canon lens disappear. It's case had an ID label saying Canon 300 mm. Usually we try not to "advertise" what's in particular cases.

What's worse for us is how our cases get abused. Twice I've had cases show up with fork lift tines punched through the cases! Amazingly both times the tines missed the gear in the cases. On an around-the-world FEDEX commercial, the client begged off of being involved with shipping the 62 cases of camera gear. They didn't want to be responsible for getting our gear from location to location. Instead we had to use air cargo. Over five weeks and five cities we only had one case slightly crushed ... which DID break off a camera eyepiece. Luckily that happened in NY and it was easy for us to get that camera (one of three that we were carrying) repaired before going overseas.

We do usually carry our exposed film with us on-board. Lots of horror stories about exposed film being ruined by the high powered luggage X-ray inspection machines. We can usually demand hand inspection of film that we carry on-board. Coming out of China, we once had to open all 40 of our 35 mm 400' rolls of film, exposed and unexposed. My assistant and I, anticipating this, each had a changing bag with us. One un-tapes the cans, one by one, in the light tight bag, open the can, while the Inspector feels the film from the outside of the bag. Not really a perfect way to make sure we didn't have something else under a roll of thinner 16 mm film. Usually we don't have to open the cans. They just run those wipes around the cans and put them into their sniffer analyzers.

[Kurt Rahn]

I don't understand why they don't put up security cameras. Seems like with a few well-placed cameras they could cover most of the baggage areas and even if the cameras weren't monitored all the time, the psychological effect of being watched would cut down on this crap dramatically, I'd wager.

[John Coffey]

FedEx. Much more secure then the airlines because they do have security cameras and staff in all the distribution centers.