This woman left her AirPods on a plane; she tracked them to an airport worker’s home

“The pockets were open, and my AirPods were gone,” she says.

Of course, everyone’s gadgets are precious, but Hayden’s AirPods hold particular significance – they’re her link to her husband, who calls her from his deployment on such a bad line that she needs them to hear him.

In the meantime, she says, she marked the AirPods as “lost” on the app, so that anyone who used them would hear a message telling them that they were hers, and giving them her phone number.

“First they were like, ‘I’m sorry you lost your belongings on our flight.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t lose them, I was denied the ability to get my jacket by an employee… and now my $250 AirPods are missing.’”

United would later clarify to Hayden in an email that they were “not a United employee but a vendor.”

She says now: “I can’t make any assumptions, but what I know is that they were in the pocket when I got up, I wasn’t allowed back to my seat, and by the time the steward brought [the jacket] to me they weren’t there – and when I tracked them, they were at an employee’s house.”

Hayden says the detective told her that “the information had been given to United Cargo, and they were going to call this person into the office and question him.”