AirPods are not cheap accessories, but how much are they worth to you? For one woman, they were worth enough to track down halfway across the country.
Alisabeth Hayden was flying back to the U.S. after visiting her husband in Tokyo where he has been deployed. The nine-hour flight to San Francisco International Airport had exhausted the Washington resident who forgot her denim jacket on the plane. Inside the jacket pocket were her AirPods.
“I realized before I was even off the plane,” she says of her jacket. “I was the third from last off the plane, so I asked the flight attendant if I could go and get it. He said no — I was required by federal law to get off the plane and stand beside it, where the strollers are brought to. I was tired, he said he’d bring it to me, I said okay.”
The flight attendant brought Hayden her jacket and she boarded her next flight to Seattle. It was only when she tried to drown out the noise of a screaming child that she noticed that her jacket pockets were open and her AirPods had vanished.
As the flight had already embarked, Hayden took advantage of the WiFi onboard to track her AirPods using the Find My app and located them at San Francisco International where she noticed they were moving.
“I’m a diligent person, and I tracked the whole way from San Francisco to Seattle, taking screenshots the entire time,” she explains. “I live an hour from Seattle, and once I got home, I was still taking screenshots.”
According to the app, the pricey earphones were situated on the cargo side of the airport and moved through the terminals until they landed at the address of an airport employee.
Hayden contacted the airport, United Airlines, and even the authorities in an attempt to retrieve her belongings but was dismissed with superficial apologies. She refused to give up, and eventually retrieved her precious pods with the assistance of a detective from the San Mateo police force who worked at the airport.
It took 12 days for Hayden to finally get her AirPods back, though she says they were damaged. After being confronted with the evidence, United offered her $271.91 to buy a new pair and 5,000 miles as an apology.
The matter is now being handled by the San Francisco Airport Police Department, which plans to submit the case to the San Mateo District Attorney.