"Opinion: New air travel safety concerns have made it more likely that you'll have to send your laptop as checked luggage." In eWEEK.com, August 17, 2006, Wayne Rash gives a solution for protecting a laptop with a lockable hard case in his article The Art of Checking Your Laptop as Luggage.
One comment to this article pointed out that laptops, though physically protected from rough baggage handling, are at greater risk of being stolen when checked as baggage. If it comes to having to check laptops, perhaps putting the protective laptop case into another suite case buried between clothing layers could help.
See Rescue Me! for ways to protect data and find a stolen laptop.
