You’ve just disembarked your plane and as you’re on the jetway, your teen thinks that they left their iPad in the seat pocket in front of them. Or you check your pockets and notice your wallet’s not there – maybe it fell out of your pocket and is still on the plane? It should be simple enough to go back on the plane and check, right?
Wrong.
The flight attendant stops you at the door of the plane: “I’m sorry, you can’t go back on the plane after you’ve left it.”
Why not?
There are a couple of reasons why passengers can’t go back on planes after they’ve left. They basically cull down into 2 overall reasons:
Safety and security
Once you leave the plane, airlines are concerned about what you could have grabbed. Granted, the air side of an airport should be safe, but there’s still the possibility you (well, not YOU you – but anyone trying to re-enter a plane) could have grabbed something, anything you shouldn’t have, and now you could bring it onto the plane, with plans to do any sort of nefarious thing (I know it sounds silly – I’m a law-abiding citizen, too – but airlines are still obviously concerned enough about this that it’s one of the reasons why you can’t get back into the plane).
Causing a delay
Airlines are also concerned about the potential of delays, should a passenger go back onto a plane and start looking for their “stuff” (or whatever reason they gave for re-embarkation).
Planes are, of course, on very tight schedules. While you’re getting off the plane, people are already preparing the cabin for the next flight, so the next set of passengers can load and they can be on their way.
Someone trying to re-board the plane while everyone else is still getting off would be like a salmon trying to swim upstream and would just cause a slowdown.
But even if they waited until the plane had been emptied of passengers, if they let someone onto the flight, there’s a chance of a massive delay. Because it’s not just looking on their seat for their reading glasses. It’s looking under the seats near them. Maybe it’s in the overhead. The wallet they can’t find might have fallen out of their pocket in the lavatory, so better check there too.
What should you do, then?
If you’ve left something on the plane, tell the flight attendant at the front of the plane – a crew member who’s still on the plane can check to see if that iPad is in seat 23A.
Or if you’ve already left the jetway, tell the gate agent.
And if you’ve already left the airside of the airport when you’ve noticed something missing, contact the airport’s Lost & Found department. Each airline has its own lost item form online, so also fill that out.
Will you get your stuff back? Hopefully? Maybe? But your best bet is to make DARN sure you take everything with you when you leave that plane. 😉
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