Can Apple’s AirTags tell if your luggage made it onto your flight?

"Sorry for the stupid question but if my baggage is not on the flight, am I able to do anything about it?"

Hi Xwu: this is not in any shape a "stupid question", in fact it's actually one which a few people have posed.

First up, I don't expect any passenger who noticed their AirTagged luggage would expect the flight to be held up while their bags were loaded, in fact I doubt that showing the bag's location (eg sitting on the other side of the terminal) on the Find My map to a flight attendant would make any difference, because we all know how tech can get things wrong.

This is one reason I'm an advocate of airlines being pro-active with bag tracking and sending passengers an app-based alert to inform them that their bag has been loaded, or for the cabin crew to come to the passenger (likely after take-off) and inform them the bag wasn't loaded and here's what we are doing about it (it's being put onto the next flight to deliver to your hotel, here's how much the airline can offer for buying replacement clothing if the bags won't be there tonight, offering upgrade to business or even first class if there's space available as a short-term 'sorry!' etc).

And as to "I would end up getting upset over something I can’t do anything about" - well, that's where I would see things differently. If I was on a flight and I knew my bags hadn't made the flight, I would actually be in a much better position of control and being able to do something about it, than if I remained in blissful ignorance until arriving at my destination, waiting in vain around the baggage carousel for an hour with tension rising, then spending another frantic, even panicked half-hour dealing with the lost baggage department or the service desk.

For starters, knowing the bag missed my flight would save me that 90 minutes and all that tension and panic. While sitting on the flight I could look at my schedule for the evening (using the example of a day flight to somewhere overseas) and consider if the clothes I had were suitable: if I was going out for dinner and drinks with friends or business colleagues then I'd know that on arrival I need to head to the mall (which mall? Is there one below or near my hotel? If I know the hotel and mall, do I know they have the right shops for me?) to quickly buy some new clothes.

Likewise, if I was on the last flight and thus my bags would not reach me until the next day, and I had to go into meetings or a conference right after breakfast, I'd again be forewarned to hit the shops that night and know the sort of 'emergency clothes' to buy.

If there were other things in my bag which I needed for the night or the next day - business presentation material, handouts, samples or whatever – I'd also be able to think about how to deal with that.

Now I'd much rather be doing all that at 30,000 feet, in a comfortable business class seat with hours ahead and a calming drink at hand and ideally Internet access to help make Plan B arrangements, than to be dumped into it on arrival while staring at an empty baggage carousel. In fact, having done all I could mid-flight, I'd actually feel quite calm and in control.

(FWIW, I had a delayed bag scenario quite some years back after a flight to HKG and all of the above was exactly what I could have done during the flight, in advance of landing, had I known my bag had missed the flight.)

Hi Racala: 'lost' bags, although more accurately just delayed/misrouted than 'lost' in some baggage version of the Bermuda Triangle, are certainly in the absolute monitory. I think most frequent flyers have a story or two of when their checked luggage went astray, just like you have, but when you take into account the many many flights where luggage turns up on the belt as expected, 'lost' is absolutely the smallest faction of the whole. We probably tend to forget about the 99.9% of successes because that's what should happen, and we remember the 0.1% of failures for the same reason, because they stand out and cause such inconvenience. I'm same as you BTW, a heavy-duty international flyer and while I avoid checked luggage as much as possible, it's often a necessary evil, and in my decades of flying I've only twice had a bag delayed or misdirected.

As to the AirTag being 'just another gadget', I should just stress that it's not really intended for tracking checked baggage, that was just something which popped up as a possible use case beyond the regular 'keeping track of your stuff' model aimed at mainstream people on the ground, so we wanted to look into this and help readers set expectations.

That's some good real world feedback, thanks Phil. I'd suspected that if on a WiFi-equipped flight and on a smaller aircraft like a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320 one might be able to 'see' one's luggage, especially if the bag is close to your seat or there are other iPhone users connecting to a more distant bag. Nice to know your bags made it on the flight with you!

It could be, but not when it's moving unless there's somebody in the car with an iPhone, or if the car is stationary in vicinity of other iPhones, eg at traffic lights, traffic jam, or at a parking lot. Have a search with Google for more on how that works.