This true story reminds me of the movie "Internet Lost", although this is just a story about finding the headphones, the plot is far less twisty than the movie, but it is more real.
In the United States, a woman named Elizabeth Hayden lost her AirPods while getting off a plane in San Francisco, and she quickly realized that they had been stolen.
Hayden often flew long distances to visit her husband, who served in the military
Hayden's husband, who served in the military, had been transferred to Tokyo on a plane back to the United States from Tokyo after visiting him.
After a nine-hour flight back from Tokyo, she dropped her denim jacket on the seat when she disembarked at San Francisco International Airport.
"I even realized I had forgotten my jacket just after I stepped down the ramp," she said. "I was the penultimate to get off the plane, so I asked the flight attendants if they could go and get it, and they said no, according to federal law, I can't turn back and enter the cabin again, but I can wait at the baggage claim station, they said they would bring it to me, I said yes."
Hayden did retrieve his jacket and boarded the next flight to Seattle as planned. "It was a bit noisy in the cabin," she recalls, "and I went to look for Airpods in the breast pocket of my denim jacket, and I remember buttoning up both pockets, one with headphones and one with some yen in it." Then I found that the pocket was opened and the AirPods were gone. ”
She initially tracked the headset moving back and forth in the airport area
At this moment, the plane has taken off for Seattle, Hayden uses the Wi-Fi on the plane to open the "Find My" application to track the headset, sees that the AirPods are still at San Francisco Airport, and then on the way from San Francisco to Seattle, she tracked the whole way, taking screenshots of the whole process.
AirPods appear on the map in a place called "United Cargo," still inside the airport, but on the cargo side of the airline, not where the passengers are. The headset then moved to Terminal 2, Terminal 3, onto Highway 101, south to San Mateo, and finally to a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he stayed for three days.
Hayden began to figure out how to get them back, she messaged United and the San Francisco airport, and then contacted the San Francisco police, "I looked for every channel I could find, and the answer was that I was sorry!" She said.
She marked the AirPods as "lost" on the app and left a phone number so that anyone using the pair would hear the message, but no one reached out to her.
Hayden tracked the headset to a home in the Bay Area
San Francisco airport police eventually helped, matching the address of the headset signal to the address of an airport employee affiliated with United's logistics contractor, who Hayden was on a United flight that day, and the police arrested the employee.
After 12 days, Hayden finally found her AirPods, wrapped in toilet paper-sized bubble wrap and as if they had been stepped on! Why bother? She went on to complain to United, and a week later, United agreed to pay $271.91, plus 5,000 miles, as an apology.
Hayden continued to receive pushes about the location of the headphones during the loss of the Airpod
Hayden finally used his tenacity to get back what belonged to him.