Did you ever wonder what would happen if your son left the carry-on suitcase he was pulling at the bottom of the jetway before getting on the plane, because that’s what we always do in Madison, but there wasn’t actually a gate-check tag on it?
It turns out that, at least if you do this in Tucson on American, and if you have a luggage tag with your name on it, they’ll cross-reference the name against their passenger record and correctly check the bag through to your final destination.
Because of a rather memorable anecdote I heard when I was little, I’m always amazed when the answer to questions like this isn’t, “First they shoot it, and then they blow it up.”
I once heard an airport announcer say something to the effect of, “If you are the owner of the black Subaru parked in the passenger drop-off area, please come claim your vehicle.” To this day, I’m curious about why the announcement wasn’t more like, “If you are the owner of the black Subaru parked in the passenger drop-off area, don’t bother looking for it because we already blew it up.”