About 25 years ago, I worked for Compass Electronics as their Marketing Rep and Dealer Coordinator. It required that I make driving trips around the country, as well as fly into some locations, rent a vehicle, then drive a route before I flew home. On more than one occasion my luggage didn't arrive where I did, and on two occasions, some of the boxes with new demo detectors didn't arrive, either, and it took a few days for them to track them down and get them to where I was. That made it even worse for me since I don't like flying in the first place!
I stopped flying with the exception of two trips I took to Utah and Nevada in the past 10 years or so for a couple of ghost town trips. Both times I traveled very light, and I made sure to have my carry-on bag. Naturally, I needed a change of clothes so those went in the check-in suitcase. In there I included my heavy-duty cordura type gun-type belt w/recovery pouch that has my rounded-off screwdriver in it and my Lesche digger in the sheath. They prefer that in checked luggage and not carry-on.
My carry-on bag would fit in the overhead bin and had my metal detector and batteries (removed) and any extra small, 'non-dangerous' items that wouldn't disturb the air traffic checkers. If my clothes didn't male it, I could still hunt and go to a thrift store for emergency detecting apparel. I can easily pack a detector for ghost town hunting and even other applications, if I pick the right size detector, break it down to fit a padded bag, and I use a smaller-than-stock search coil most of the time anyway.
The last trip I took a Tesoro Tej
