AirPods are really popular headphones among Apple users. They are small, practical and easy to use, and also offer high quality sound. But they go much further, as they include the possibility of locating them with the iPhone’s Find app.
A feature that has proven to be very useful in many situations. Most recently, a woman who forgot her AirPods on a plane and recovered them at the home of an airport worker thanks to the Find app and her iPhone.
Weeks of captures, interrogations and a bit of publicity as a recipe for success
The story begins in early March when Alisabeth Hayden, a passenger based in Washington state, lost her AirPods on a flight from Tokyo to San Francisco. Upon disembarking from the plane at San Francisco International Airport, Alisabeth left her jacket on her seat in the back of the plane.
As CNN reports, she noticed the foul, but the flight attendant told her she couldn’t come back for it due to federal law, so Alisabeth waited by the aircraft to receive her jacket. With it, she was able to board her next flight to Seattle. With a crying child on the plane, Alisabeth thought “well, at least I have the AirPods”… but nope.
Our protagonist noticed that the front pockets of the jacket were unbuttoned and the headphones inside were gone. In the middle of the flight to Seattle, using the plane’s Wi-Fi, Alisabeth started tracking her AirPods with the Find app. She noticed they were moving around the airport and kept track of them with the app, taking screenshots throughout.
After arriving home, still tracking the AirPods, they appeared in a location that Maps labeled as “United Cargo,” within the airport itself. A good sign, as it meant they were not in the possession of another passenger. From there they went to Terminal 2, then Terminal 3, and then traveled down 101 to San Mateo.
Eventually, the AirPods arrived at a residential address in the Bay Area and remained there for three days. Here the police had to intervene, questioning the plane’s cleaners, cargo personnel and gradually clarifying the situation. She did so because Alisabeth contacted United in every possible way, even sending emails to most of the executives, who replied regretting the situation, but without offering any solutions.
A San Mateo police detective questioned the worker in whose home the headphones with the app were located, who denied any connection to the matter until the officer showed him screenshots of Alisabeth with the AirPods detected in her home. From there the pieces began to fall into place and, after a few weeks of losing them, Alisabeth was able to retrieve her AirPods.
“They seem to have been trampled on,” the protagonist recalled, so she promptly contacted United again to discuss the status of the returned AirPods. It wasn’t until CNN contacted the airline that the airline paid a total of $271.91 in “expenses” and offered 5000 miles as an apology to Alisabeth.
A happy ending to a story that shows how determination and the will to achieve something, in this case getting back an AirPods, can move mountains. Part of the motivation was that, for Alisabeth, these AirPods were the only way to talk to her husband in the Armed Forces, whose line of communication was of such poor quality that without the AirPods at maximum volume it was impossible to understand his words.
In any case, while we await the arrival of USB-C on the AirPods Pro, it is clear that Apple’s Find network has proved its worth once again. A network with which it is possible to locate anything anywhere in the world just by accessing the Find app on an iPhone, iPad or Mac.
