Nick Ruiz was walking through LAX when he saw a baggage handler pull guitar cases off a luggage cart and throw them onto the ground.
He started filming. Two million people have now watched the result.
The 21-year-old college student from Connecticut was at terminal four on 16 March, heading back to New York after a holiday in Los Angeles.
The nearest aircraft was a JFK-to-LAX B777 that had just landed. He took the same plane home.
“The whole situation felt wrong,” Ruiz told CreatorZine.
“My instinct was to start filming. I hope your guitars are ok.”
‘That’s easily $3,000 of equipment’
The clip picked up over 2 million views and 174,900 likes. The comments were not kind to the handler.
“That stuff is so expensive and throwing it like it’s trash is wild,” wrote one viewer.
“That’s easily $3,000 of equipment by the way,” said another.
“That should be a fireable offense,” added a third. “I’d lose my mind,” said someone else.
Others simply called it “absolutely disgraceful.”
Why it matters
Baggage handling horror stories are as old as air travel, but the frequency with which they now get filmed and go viral has changed the stakes for airlines and ground crews.
Two million views on a clip of guitars being thrown is the kind of exposure that no airport wants and no PR team can undo.
For travellers, particularly musicians, the video confirms what many already suspected: fragile items in the hold are not treated with care, regardless of how many “fragile” stickers are attached.
For creators, Ruiz’s clip is another example of bystander footage outperforming produced content by a wide margin.
He did not plan to make a viral video. He just pointed his phone at something that looked wrong.
Two million people agreed.
LAX has been approached for comment.
