Broken Headstock

I have no idea what a luthier would charge, but that looks like a difficult repair to me, with all the cracked and torn wood at the break... Glad it's not your guitar, Jim!

OH MAN!!! That's nasty!!! And it's not a cheap guitar! It has an ebony fingerboard and fancy tuner buttons. I don't see a scarf joint (on an angle) where the headstock would have been glued to. That's about where they would normally break and leave a nice long surface to glue. ALTHOUGH, now that I look closer, the headstock looks to be attached with a finger joint. It will never look good again, but it's probably reglue-able. It's hard to tell from just one picture.

I think they should replace the guitar. Its going to look like crap after its fixed. The value is drastically reduced.

I saw this article when it came out and heard about it on Talk-radio.  Man, now that I see the picture, I think some of the opinions were right; I think someone purposefully crunched that thing.  It was in a hard case and the case had no damage on it.  I don't care how far or hard that case could potentially have "moved" that is not a natural impact break in my opinion.

That aside, Flyer Beware applies here.  He's lucky he even got 1500 bucks from Air Canada.  I would think and expect it might cost the whole 1500 (or at least most of it) to have that messy, non-clean break repaired.  And as others have said, even after the best repair, it'll never be the same again.

The guy said he's a pro and has traveled with that guitar for years.  Something about that just doesn't seem right to me.  He probably got really lucky all those years and was ignorant.  Most "pros" know that if you want to travel with an acoustic, you must go to extreme measures to protect it from the airline and the airplane cargo-hold, either that, or travel with a cheap "road" guitar that's easy to replace.

I would never even take my 1200 buck Alvarez on an airplane, never mind a 4000 dollar guitar.  lol.