You might be hitting the airport to fly off on vacation this summer. But every now and then, something you brought with you stays there.

As you might imagine, an BWI airport Lost and Found bin fills up with a lot of stuff every summer. And as we found out, it is not always what you would expect.

BWI Airport is a place where 30,000 people come and go every day. But about 40 times a day, 1,200 times a month, somebody loses something at a Transportation SecurityAdministration checkpoint.

But it turns out all of that stuff you have lost just doesn’t disappear. It goes to a special place — a place called Lost and Found.

“Every day, we have a TSA officer that goes checkpoint to checkpoint and brings back all the lost and found items,” said TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein.

They literally see it all here. Popular things lost range from keys to ID cards to a museum of cellphones. There are many forgotten prescriptions too. Did you lose your laptop? It’s probably here.

Most people simply forget the stuff when going through security checkpoints.

“We see a variety of items,” said Farbstein. “Common items are belts because a lot of people have to take their belts off.”

Going through our treasure hunt here, we found hats, prescription glasses and sunglasses. In fact, just about any type of sunglasses you can think of are here.

“I think it’s really odd when you spot something like a walker or a cane,” Farbstein told us.

But what is the oddest thing we found? A fairy wand which may or may not have run out of spells.

So the next time your fly, remember to hold onto your stuff before your stuff gets held onto in here.

Chester, a seven-month-old Scottish Fold kitten who was lost by Air Canada at the Montreal airport last month, has been found safe and sound — if a little skinny.

Owner Amanda Stewart, who lives in Surrey, B.C., posted a picture of Chester to Facebook on Wednesday along with the comments: “Omg omg omg” and “Hi everyone ITS BEEN CONFIRMED CHESTER HAS BEEN FOUND ALIVE. He is on his way to the vets right now.”

Stewart confirmed to CBC News that Chester had been found by a woman, also named Amanda, who works at the Montreal-Trudeau airport lost and found where Chester was lost.

“I’m happy. I’m just hoping that he’s OK right now. That he’s healthy,” Stewart told CBC News. “He seems to be skinny.”

Isabelle Arthur, a spokeswoman for Air Canada lost and found, said the airline was advised by the Montreal Airport Authority team this morning that Chester had been located.

“They subsequently delivered him to our cargo team. As soon as we confirmed it was Chester, we advised his owner. Chester is now at a local veterinarian for a full checkup,” Arthur said.

She said Air Canada was making arrangements to reunite Stewart and Chester as soon as possible and will pay for all the expenses.

“We will be taking care of everything, including reuniting Chester with his owner,” Arthur said.

Stewart had bought Chester from a Quebec breeder for $1,200 more than a month ago. However, the cat managed to escape from its airline-approved cat carrier on May 21 while at the Montreal airport en route to Vancouver.

Stewart had set up a Facebook page to help co-ordinate searchers in Montreal. Just yesterday, she posted a message that said Chester had been gone so long that it wasn’t looking good. “He should have been seen by now,” she wrote.

“I had great amounts of awesome people just looking in the neighbourhoods for me. He wasn’t found in the neighbourhoods though, he was actually found inside the airport fence — along the fence is what I got — and he was spotted and then trapped this morning,” she said from Surrey, B.C.

Now Chester is at the vet getting a checkup, accompanied by an Air Canada employee who had been helping Stewart on her own time. Stewart said Chester weighs just five pounds, but is eating and drinking.

She said she hopes to get him back soon, but wants to make sure he’s in good shape before putting him on a plane.

Air Canada could have done more: owner

Stewart told CBC News that while she’s very happy that Chester was found, she is still upset with what she said was a lack of communication from the airline to the rest of the airport.

She said Air Canada could have done more to co-ordinate search efforts.

To get him back home, Stewart said she hopes that at the very least, Air Canada will allow Chester inside the cabin instead of putting him in cargo. Ideally, she said, they’d pay to have her husband fly to Montreal to collect the cat.

“I don’t want him in cargo at all.”

With an average 23,000 people racing through security on a daily basis at Dulles, you can understand why many items are left behind. Those items are kept in a small office on the ground floor of the airport. It’s the TSA’s lost and found.

The most often forgotten item? Belts. But there are plenty of laptops, cell phones, and even identification cards too.

“We’ve had dentures that people have left,” said James White, a TSA agent. “We’ve had hearing aids, glasses, car seats, stuff like you wouldn’t expect people to leave.”

Agents have also seen items that passengers probably wish they had not forgotten – from adult toys to a shrunken head.

With the strict guidelines regarding liquids, belts, shoes, and electronics, the number of items left behind has grown in recent years. It’s why some passengers approach this process like a science.

“Usually before I get in the line I’ll make sure I’ll put all that stuff inside my bag,” explained Chris Fischer, passenger. “And then it’s still in my bag when I get out instead of all over the place.”

Often passengers will call and recover their lost items. Those forgotten for more than thirty days get sent to the state’s surplus in Richmond.

Read more: http://www.wjla.com/articles/2014/04/a-look-inside-dulles-lost-and-found-101965.html#ixzz30lqTgHis

A New Jersey woman feared she lost her 25th wedding anniversary ring at Newark Liberty International Airport — but, luckily, it was found by a TSA agent who knows her diamonds.

Navnett Guleria, 52, said she took the ring off and hooked it to a bracelet inside her purse to step through a security checkpoint at the newark aiport lost and found on Feb. 14.

The Pennington woman didn’t think to put the ring back on until after she boarded a London-bound plane with her husband, but the wedding band was nowhere to be found.

“I panicked,” she told The Star-Ledger. “I was really upset, but the cabin was already closed.”

Guleria believed she would never see the ring again, but still contacted the Transportation Security Administration’s lost and found office when she returned home 10 days later.

To her surprise, an employee told her the ring had been found.

Officials said another passenger spotted the ring on the floor at the checkpoint and handed it over to TSA Officer Meredith Grillos.

When I saw it, I knew right away it was absolutely real,” the officer said in a statement. “It was beautiful. I know my diamonds and I’m sure the woman was very distraught.”

Grillos gave the ring to the agency’s lost and found office, which mailed Guleria her wedding band a few days after she called.

“I was ecstatic,” Guleria told the newspaper. “I was so happy.”

Source: NYDailyNews.com

From jars of honey to diamond engagement rings, it all ends up in the Transportation Security Administration’s Lost and Found office. And for this week in particular, Super Bowl XLVII memorabilia items from fans at the game — like a seat cushion and ear muffs with the logo on it — are turning up in the office.

For items found at Newark airport, that means a small, gray, windowless room on Kean University’s campus in Union, where closets filled with forgotten coats and sunglasses to bins of smart phones and jewelry line the walls. The TSA has a property custodian that brings the leftover items to the office daily, where they are then sorted by date and security checkpoint, said Ofelia Ruiz, TSA customer support manager.

“It’s a shame some of the items — you can tell they have sentimental value,” Ruiz said.

The items most commonly left behind by passengers rushing through security are belts, keys and electronics, Ruiz said.
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A former Transportation Security Administration supervisor at Charlotte Douglas International Airport was arrested Thursday morning, after allegations he stole from the airport’s lost and found.

TSA officials said Wednesday that Angel Caban, 33, was fired after the theft accusations surfaced.

On Thursday, public records show Caban was arrested and charged with one count of misdemeanor larceny. He was being held in Mecklenburg County’s jail under $500 secured bond.

According to two airport officials familiar with the case, Caban was accused of stealing electronic items from the lost and found.

Caban does not appear to have any criminal history in North Carolina, according to public records.

TSA Administrator John Pistole has made stopping theft one of his priorities, implementing harsher penalties and conducting random sting operations to test employees by leaving valuables at checkpoints

There are laptops and cameras, passports and drivers licenses from all 50 states, plenty of luggage and bags, stuffed animals, jewelry and belts.

Then there are the rare items like a violin, binoculars, false teeth and a prosthetic eye. Every year, 30,000 items show up inside Sea-Tac Airport’s lost and found — all of them left behind in the airport terminal or the TSA Security line.

But all that stuff is not what makes the lost and found so special: It’s the people who work there.
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Nine members of staff at Heathrow Airport have been arrested on suspicion of stealing items from lost property, police have confirmed.

The suspects, six men and three women, are accused of being involved in 43 separate thefts, between May and September this year.

Aged between 24 and 63, they were arrested by officers from the Metropolitan Police Service’s aviation security command at the west London airport and at residential properties.

They have all been suspended and are currently being held custody.

A spokesman for the airport, which handled 70 million passengers last year, said: ‘Heathrow Airport recently contacted the Metropolitan Police to ask them to investigate a report of the possible theft of items from airport lost property.

‘Following an investigation, the police have today arrested nine Heathrow employees. 

‘The employees in question have been suspended while the police complete their investigation. 

‘We take any report of criminal behaviour seriously at Heathrow and will be taking appropriate action if there is a case to answer.’

Police said searches are under way at a number of locations.

Superintendent Martin Hendy said: ‘Police at Heathrow work together with our partners at the airport to ensure that any allegations of criminal activity are robustly investigated to ensure the travelling public and staff at the airport enjoy a safe and secure environment.

‘Today’s arrests support that commitment.’

As the song goes, the cat came back, although not the next day.

A feline that escaped his carrier on his way to board an Air Canada flight Saturday has been found.

Owner Pat Torlen got a call from cargo employees at 3 a.m. Thursday morning saying that her cat, Lightning, was spotted in the cargo building. He was retrieved at 8 a.m. from under a tank where he was hiding.

Lightning was supposed to fly cargo, along with sister Cricket, to Vancouver on Sept. 21. Torlen and the rest of the family would follow a week later.

When Torlen dropped them off at the airport, she secured the sides of the cat carriers with straps and ensured the doors were firmly shut.

Just before the flight, Air Canada called Torlen to tell her Lightning escaped.

“They told me the last time they had seen Lightning was when he was in his carrier on the baggage cart.”

Air Canada cargo staff said they think the carrier case door bumped open on the way to the plane. They searched for the missing cat with no luck. Torlen was even invited into the restricted area to look for the escapee. Within hours, complete strangers were volunteering their time to help find the feline.

Torlen said she would not go to Vancouver until Lightning was found.

“I’ll say here as long as I can and stay with family and friends and continue the search,” she said.

Now with Lightning safe and sound, Torlen can fly out with her family this weekend as planned.

With a report from Alesia Fieldberg

A Passenger at heathrow airport catching London based Virgin Airlines left a prosthetic limb behind. Airport staff found the prosthetic limb in the washroom and it was successfully returned to the owner. For more information and details about this situation..

It is comprehensible that in their rush to disembark, passengers often leave behind their belongings such as mobile phones, iPods, reading glasses and books in the aircraft. But how does one explain leaving behind a prosthetic limb?

It begins as soon as the aircraft docks into its bay. A sense of urgency takes over the passenger cabin as overhead bins are opened, bags and belongings gathered. Passengers pour into the aisle. Some rush to join the queue to disembark and quite a few leave behind their belongings. Generally these are things with an inherent potential to get misplaced like reading glasses, headphones, CDs and like. But London-based airline Virgin Atlantic recently carried out a survey among its cabin crew members and ground staffers to find out what objects passengers often forget to take, and got a bizarre list that had more than the usual suspects.

The most frequent items left behind by flyers were books, reading glasses, mobile phone, cameras, headphones, makeup kits, neck pillows, CDs and duty-free shopping. A few even forgot to take valuable items such as passports, iPods, iPads, kindles, laptops and even wedding rings.

In 2011, a passenger on board a London-Delhi flight left behind his artificial limb. But how did he walk out of the aircraft?

“He had an injury and must have removed his limb to relax. He disembarked in the wheel-chair and a while later our crew found the leg,” said the airline spokesperson. The strangeness of the list does not surprise the airline.

“Passengers leave all sorts of items on our flights ranging from the predictable to the quite unexpected.

We were surprised to find the artificial limb left behind by one of our Upper Class passengers and were happy to reunite them,” said Stephen King, general manager, Virgin Atlantic-India.

He added that many passengers start their vacation the moment they get on the aircraft and they relax into their holiday mood, they often forget personal belongings onboard.

The forgetfulness can extend to even the absolute essentials, like shoes. “Some passengers change into a comfortable pair of footwear once on board, and then forget to change back into their shoes,” said the spokesperson.

If one thought that large, conspicuous objects are not likely to left behind, the list disproves that. One passenger had left behind a baby stroller after the flight landed in London; another common item was wedding rings. The marital band is apparently a common item that is left behind. Evidently, quite a few passengers remove their rings on board Virgin’s flights.

“Virgin Atlantic tries to return the forgotten items to passengers. And, any item that is not claimed for more than six months, if not perishable, are donated for charitable causes,” the airline spokesperson said.