The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) made award-winning movie director Pavel Talankin check his coveted Academy Awards ‘Oscar’ statuette into his checked luggage on Thursday, but when he arrived at his destination, the airline had no idea where his luggage was.
Pavel Talankin, who won the Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards in the ‘Best Documentary Feature’ category for his movie Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which follows a Russian teacher who covertly documented his hometown’s transformation to a war center for the Ukraine invasion.
Despite having traveled with his Oscar statuette in his carry-on luggage on several occasions since winning the priceless gong in March, when Talankin went to travel with the German flag carrier Lufthansa from New York JFK to Frankfurt on April 30, his bag was stopped at the TSA security checkpoint.
The TSA officers on duty allegedly deemed the statuette a potential weapon and told him that he would have to be parted from it because it would have to be checked into the cargo hold of the plane.
Talankin reluctantly agreed and checked his bag in at the Lufthansa counter before heading to his departure gate for the overnight flight to Germany.
On arrival in Frankfurt, Talankin waited patiently at the baggage carousel until the realization dawned on him that his bag was not going to appear.
Talankin immediately reported what had happened to Lufthansa, and it wasn’t lost on the airline that they had a potential public relations nightmare on their hands. The airline quickly launched an extensive search, with workers ordered to frantically search the airport in the hope of tracking down the missing bag.
Within hours, Lufthansa was thankfully able to confirm that it had located the bag and that it had been transferred to a secure location ahead of arrangements being made to return the bag and the missing Oscar to Talankin.
Lufthansa is one of a growing group of international carriers that have integrated Apple’s ‘Find My’ service to help track lost luggage with an AirTag hidden inside.
After realizing that many travelers were using AirTags as baggage trackers, Apple began working with major international airlines to make AirTags more useful by embedding the location feature within their luggage tracking systems to trace misplaced bags and return them to their owners.
When someone reports their bag as missing after a flight, they can now include a link in their report that gives the airline access to the AirTag location feature. The idea is that the airline can use this data to quickly locate the bag and return it to its rightful owner.
