Let’s start with the problem: These days, musicians seem to be the butt end of an airline joke that nobody really finds funny. Not a single month goes by in which I don’t see pictures of some shredded instrument online, hear a horror story of a musician friend harassed by airline personnel or stand at the gate myself asking for the manger of some sh*t airline that believes it to be a good idea to take my violin from me at the gate. The last stand-off of this kind only happened a few weeks ago and ended with the airline employee pretending not to give in but kind of having to let me pass because my violin case is not a hard case. (And that is just an aside, but does anyone have contacts to GEWA and could get me a discount on that lightweight carbon fibre violin case I have wanted to have for ages but can’t really afford? Here’s the link: https://www.thestringzone.co.uk/gewa-idea-18-carbon-fibre-violin-case).
If my personal experiences are anything to go by, the situation in the UK is much worse than back on the continent. Yes, things were pretty tight when I came into Heathrow an hour late from the States, but I could still have caught my flight back to Vienna had the security people not be so very stunned by the contents of my violin case. And I am always happy to open my case and show my precious instrument (What are you expecting to find? I took out the screwdriver for my chin rest ages ago!), but there are times when I prefer to keep it safely in its case and run to the gate so as not to be stuck at the airport for 6 hours after an overnight flight. Compare that to the situation in Germany where a security officer in Berlin looked at the 4/4 tag on my violin case and said, ‘So, I take it you are only allowed to play whole notes on that violin?’ That’s a country with a solid cultural sector and a decent school system.
‘Could you not give the airline some kind of advance warning?’, I can hear the pessimists among you say. Well, I could, and I would if that actually helped. I don’t know how much precious lifetime I have spent on the phone to some airline trying to find out if I will be allowed to take my instrument into the cabin, and more than once have I been informed that the life-and-death decision for my instrument will be taken at the gate, which is about a day too late. If I am already at the gate and they try to take my violin, I can either create a fuss (which will get me kicked off the fight) or decide not to board the flight (with a similar outcome minus the security person dragging me away). Only recently, the chief executive of a London orchestra told me that the orchestra had trouble getting their instruments on a flight although the flight had been booked through a specialized travel agency and all the big instruments had their own booked and paid-for seat. Call me elitist, but an orchestra needing instruments should come as a surprise to nobody.
The upside: On the upside, though, it’s now super easy to make friends when you’re travelling with an instrument, as the stress and the common enemy immediately bind you to all fellow flying musicians. On my last flight, I made no fewer than two new violinist friends and one guitarist friend (which should show you that we are not snobbish! We make friends with people even if their instrument has no place in a string quartet).
Friend number one I bumped into at the security gate in Heathrow. She was sporting the tiniest violin case I have ever seen and a matching quiver to hold the bow (the violin case was that tiny), which made her seem an awful lot like Robin Hood. I could practically see her shoot her bow at someone before my inner eye, which made me absurdly happy. My friend was going home to her native Japan and expressed surprise over the fact that I even dared think I would get a case as big as mine onto a flight and as things go with musicians, we started talking and it turned out that she had lived and studied in Salzburg for four years and spoke excellent German and we decided to be friends.
Friend number two I met on the bus going towards the plane that would take me back to London. This one was a very typical romance. We saw each other, saw our violins, naturally gravitated towards each other as if our violins were magnetic and then struck up a conversation about how difficult it was to travel with instruments these days. My friend had lived through a few horror stories herself in that regard and told me that because of this, she always said a short prayer to God, the Lord himself, before going to the gate with her violin. No judgement here. If 12 years of state-funded religious indoctrination have taught me anything (apart from the fact that I need to honour my husband), it’s that God always has an open ear for our worries, no matter how small and insignificant they seem. And I know that God is almighty and probably has no problem multitasking, but if a musician feels she needs the help of the Lord when flying with her instrument, you know something is wrong.
Friend number three and I never exchanged a word, but our looks said it all. We were waiting to board a flight from Vienna to London and pretending to be super nonchalant about our oversize instrument cases. I looked at his guitar and thought, ‘You’ll never get on the flight with that thing’ and he looked at my violin case that is so big that it often gets mistaken for a viola case and thought, ‘You’ll never get on the flight with that thing.’ And then we both looked at a third person who overtook us with an instrument case so big that I swear it was only a tad smaller than a cello case and we both thought, ‘He’ll never get on the flight with that thing’. And then all three of us marched through the barrier and the airline employees acted as if our instrument cases did not exist. And it was at this moment that I realized we had stumbled upon the solution that would let us awake from this horrible nightmare.
The solution: Here’s my advice to all my musician friends, which is also an unashamed advertisement that I don’t get paid for: fly Austrian Airlines. Like anything from Austria, Austrian Airlines might seem a bit weird and I find their flight attendants rather scary (probably because they reflect back to me how weird and scary I am myself). One of them once laughed at me when I was bleeding profusely after I had cut myself with a plastic butter knife. (‘What? You cut yourself with THAT knife?) Their English is sometimes so difficult to understand as to be unintelligible and would someone please tell the pilots that saying hello from the cockpit in hour 7 of an 8-hour flight completely misses the point? Also, if you ask if you can have a whole can of coke you have to promise to drink it all. Their uniforms are just ridiculous, and I still have a bit of a trauma from when I had to wear that uniform myself during the beginning of my illustrious career as a person who does not know what to do with her life and was repeatedly mistaken for a prostitute because of the red tights.
But the one thing (apart from the fact that they are one of the safest airlines worldwide) that makes up for all of the company’s little quirks is the fact that each and every one of the employees is amazingly skilled when handling instruments (and the attached musicians). Unlike many other airlines, they have very clear regulations on which kinds of cases you can bring on board, and I have witnessed dozens of cases in which borderline situations were decided in favour of the musician. Not once have they threatened to wring my violin out of my hands and kill it by putting it in the bag compartment. If the flight is too full, they will take everything else from you, but they will never threaten to take your instrument. The one time that I was on a flight so full that there was no way of fitting my violin case in the overhead bins, a very kindly flight attend asked if I would entrust my instrument to her. She had a special place inside the cabin where she could stow it safely so that it did not get damaged. She even let me inspect the space (and it was really great) and place the violin there myself. Imagine the Blue Danube Waltz playing as background music (they really do that!), and you’ve got one happy violinist flight story.
So, my dear musician friends, fear no more. You and your better half are safe in the hands of the airline that is like a smile in the sky. When you next get on board with them, make sure you tell them that I am out there spreading the word about how great they are. And don’t forget to ask around for the GEWA carbon fibre violin case for me. God, would that case make me happy!
