It's just fascinating to see all the things people lose

January 15, 2024 10:45 AM

People lose millions of items at airports each year. Follow the journey of the stuff from found in Seattle to sold in Alabama or auctioned in Pittsburgh. Inside Airport: Lost & Found [NatGeo, 45m] is a fascinating look at just how hard so many people work to try to reunite lost objects with the travelers who left them behind. Also, what happens to objects that can't be returned?
posted by hippybear (25 comments total)

travelers who left them behind

While I’m sure there’s some stuff that’s left by travelers in overhead bins or at security, I’d be staggered if the vast majority of items weren’t lost by the airlines.
posted by zamboni at 11:30 AM on January 15 [14 favorites]

I wonder now they sell an abandoned car. How do they deal with transfer of title? Maybe I haven’t gotten there yet.

And I can’t imagine being in a place where I had to abandon a car at an airport, yikes.
posted by teece303 at 12:58 PM on January 15

I wonder now they sell an abandoned car. How do they deal with transfer of title?

My guess is they have a contract with a towing service who takes custody of the car and handles all the paperwork, title search, etc. The tricky part would probably be proving the listed owner is gone and not coming back.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:30 PM on January 15

Here is a shorter one from my local news station about MSP's lost and found. 1500 items a month! Check out the item at 1:58 =)
posted by soelo at 1:58 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

For the cars, I like to think that the owners fell in love while on vacation and entered some whirlwind adventure.

But I suspect some of them belonged to folks that died while traveling.

Surprisingly though, the video said one of the cars belonged to a football player who apparently couldn't be bothered to collect his Escalade.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 3:03 PM on January 15

I think the main thing I came away from watching the video was, as a traveler, my mother's practice of writing her name and address on an index card and putting it inside her suitcase is actually a smart, low-effort way to make certain your stuff will get back to you. The lengths they were going to in attempts to reunite property with people felt pretty extraordinary.
posted by hippybear at 3:18 PM on January 15 [6 favorites]

This summer my son forgot his ancient Kobo eReader on an Air Canada plane when he disembarked in Ottawa. We got an email the next day saying they had found his eReader, and we could pick it up at the airport for free in Vancouver in the next so many days. We had to pick it up there because they found it when the plane got back to Vancouver. Alternatively, we could pay almost two hundred bucks to have it couriered to Ottawa or declare that we didn’t want it back.

We said they could keep it. It was cheaper to get him a brand new Kobo than to have the old one returned.
posted by fimbulvetr at 4:01 PM on January 15 [4 favorites]

It's a shame that Air Canada didn't have any form of transport to move that Kobo reader between Ottawa and Vancouver, like something happening several times a day wherein that reader could have traveled for basically free.

Maybe Air Canada should look at setting up something like that.
posted by hippybear at 4:05 PM on January 15 [21 favorites]

They did eventually answer the cars question. The airport calls. The police call. The DMV calls. If the owner never responds they can auction it (must be some paperwork, I assume).

I did like that the airport that was auctioning lost personal belongings was donating the money to a foundation, not just giving the money to some corporate overlord.

I would like to know the story behind the two full suits of armor that the place in Alabama had seen.
posted by teece303 at 4:33 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]

I will say the two times I've had a suitcase not make the trip with me, it didn't go missing. The airlines, in both cases, let me know they knew my bag had not made the trip with me, and both times the bag showed up to whatever address I told them to deliver it to, by private car courier.

I've flown a lot and checked a lot of bags so only two lost bags across my maybe 40 years of air travel is a pretty good track record.
posted by hippybear at 4:42 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]

Investigating this stuff seems like a pretty fun job, though I imagine they get yelled at a lot.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:10 PM on January 15 [2 favorites]

Even though my stuff has only been lost a couple times, I still find it weirdly reassuring to tuck an Airtag into my bag -- I like getting the "Your thing is near you again!" ping like thirty seconds before my bag shows up on the conveyor belt.
posted by aramaic at 5:13 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]

I've flown a lot and checked a lot of bags so only two lost bags across my maybe 40 years of air travel is a pretty good track record.

I don’t fly much at all. So I only ever hear the horror stories about lost luggage. Which I get, even a delay of 2 days for your bag could be a nightmare, even if it was just a rare mistake by the airline.

But it was very interesting to see just how hard they work to reunite people with their stuff.

And the stuff the airline misplaced was the easy stuff.

It was the things just left on a plane or in the airport that they really worked hard on.
posted by teece303 at 5:19 PM on January 15

While I’m sure there’s some stuff that’s left by travelers in overhead bins or at security, I’d be staggered if the vast majority of items weren’t lost by the airlines.

As the video says, 70% of the airport's lost-and-found comes from TSA checkpoints.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:28 PM on January 15

As the video says, 70% of the airport's lost-and-found comes from TSA checkpoints.

I remember that, too.

And since 2/3rds of all lost items at an airport are due to TSA, which may not, or may, be largely security theater…

It would be nice to see the Feds donating whatever that 70% works out to be in any given year, to see that dollar amount donated to an appropriate non-profit.
posted by teece303 at 6:30 PM on January 15

It is important to realize there are two streams of things happening here, and I'm not sure how much they overlap.

The airline lost and found and the airport lost and found... I don't think are the same thing at all? Or maybe they start off separate but their streams converge at some point? I'd have to re-watch the video. They seem to be separate but maybe are not but maybe are and then are not?
posted by hippybear at 6:44 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

At least at the first airport they showed, TSA took the 70% of things lost under their purview and gave it to the airport to deal with.
posted by teece303 at 6:57 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

My parents travelled out of Amsterdam last fall with 2 checked bags. The first sign the saw was the mountains of luggage sitting around the airport. Needless to say, their luggage was lost...for 3 months! I flew in and out of Amsterdam just a few weeks later and the KLM sky magazine had a printed apology on the first page from the president/CEO/whoever saying they were working hard to get everyone's luggage back to them.

And their did get returned! Some of the clothes were a little moldy but all their souvenirs were there!
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:21 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

I think it's like, item left at TSA is airport lost and found, item left is a seat pocket on an airline, airline lost and found? Do the airline and airport lost and found streams ever mix?

Again, I'd have to watch the video again. Still pretty fascinating.

I don't think there was ever a car in an airline lost and found stream, but I could be wrong.
posted by hippybear at 7:28 PM on January 15 [2 favorites]

Just a note: the video is geoblocked for some.
posted by fridgebuzz at 3:14 AM on January 16

6 or 7 years ago I had a gig in american samoa. Flew in from Honolulu on the sole once-weekly flight, got a small visa stamped by 3 separate officials wearing lava-lava, and waited for my luggage to come off the belt. The unloading area was basically a tin shack with not quite enough 1940's style industrial pendant lighting and it was raining on the corrugated roof, the noise of which added to the chaos of all the locals deplaning with a WILD assortment of stuff from the not-even-mainland, and you could hear the clamour outside of half the island outside waiting to pick up Auntie Tusi or whomever.

The inspection area consisted of 4 long wooden benches, and officials would manually go through luggage with varying degrees of energy while chatting animatedly with the passengers about their trip and what they brought back. The crowd began to thin and still my luggage had not come out of the little magic hole in the wall and onto the belt (it was one of those belt-exits-wall-at-ground-level, makes a loop, goes back into the wall. not very long but pretty much the highest tech thing in the room. Eventually the belt stopped and my luggage had still not come out. There didn't seem to be anyone to ask about this, and the passengers dwindled to zero and the inspectors walked out behind them, but since no one was really uniformed it was difficult to track who I might speak to until I was literally the only one left in the room, halfheartedly calling "excuse me?" into the open space. And then most of the lights went out with a meaty "thunk" sound.

I literally ended up trying doors at the unloading end of the room until one opened and I flagged down a guy in coveralls with a clipboard and explained that my bag had never come out. We dickered for a while because he insisted that wasn't possible and I gestured around at all the nothing, and said unless it was still on the plane we seemed to be at an impasse, and he pointed out to me that the plane was gone. He sighed and handed me a triple carbon form from Hawaiian Air and told me to go to "the store" to buy clothes and they would reimburse me. The next plane to come in that might bring my bag was the plane I was to depart on in one week.

I spent the next day wearing the clothes that i had been wearing for the prior approximately 36 hours, but since I was mostly working in the wastewater plant of a fish packer this turned out to not be a big deal. I went to "the store", bought two outfits [all tropical theme button down shirts and jeans] and a pair of safety boots. The hotel washed one set of clothes for me every night for the duration, and l picked up my bag at the airport in honolulu on the return trip. (the layover is like 8 hours so I had lots of time to sort it out.)

I never did bother to chase the reimbursement; I hate clothes shopping in general and benefited from the wardrobe gains, after all.
posted by hearthpig at 4:26 AM on January 16 [9 favorites]

> The lengths they were going to in attempts to reunite property with people felt pretty extraordinary.

On the other hand, I have stood at the counter with an agent, showing them the Find My screen on my phone showing that my lost item is less than 100 feet away, and had them insist that unfortunately they cannot retrieve my item as it is in a different city.
posted by dmd at 6:35 AM on January 16 [4 favorites]

I left a Manta sound sleep mask (a wrap-around blackout sleep mask with little flat blue tooth speakers built into the sides) on a plane from Athens to Montreal last summer. I was amazed I managed to get home with everything else.
posted by PuppyCat at 8:26 AM on January 16

We sat down in an Aer Lingus plane and my daughter said, "Someone forgot their watch."

We gave it to a flight attendant and told them what seat it had been in, but I suspect that datum won't get passed on.....
posted by wenestvedt at 10:30 AM on January 16

I lost an ear pod at my local airport (one terminal, eleven gates) last summer. It was the kind with a wire that hooks around the ear and I’d casually looped it over a strap of my daypack to go through security and then forgot about it entirely until about 15 minutes later when I was in the departure lounge at my gate. I retraced my steps but didn’t see it so last resort, I got as close as I could to the end of the conveyor belt I’d gone through and caught the attention of a TSA guy. He remembered it from being left in the bin!! A few minutes later he was able to fetch it from Lost & Found. Which was fortunate because then it was announced that my flight was delayed four hours.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:18 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]