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[monsterx]

My wife just spent the summer collecting biological specimins from a remote area.  She froze them and put them in a liquid nitrogen shipper which was too big to take carry on, so she gave it as checked baggage.   The airline has lost it, however, and the clock is ticking.  Tick. Tick. Tick.   At some point soon, the thing will thaw and the samples will be effectively lost.   Hopefully, they will return it in time, but so far they haven't passed on any information. 

Obviously, she is a bit upset about this.   It might be possible to fly out and collect some of them again before it starts to snow, but maybe not.  And anyways, that will cost a lot of money to do, as well as a few weeks time.  She is on a 2 year postdoc, and these samples are the whole project she is supposed to complete over the next two years.  So if they are gone, she has nothing to work on in winter, and only one year to do two years work next year. 

What would you do?  What kind of help can you expect from the airline?

Maybe I should put her under suicide watch.  I've lost data to accidents before, and been pretty upset about it, but nothing like this. 

[qrypt]

What a disaster.  I expect there isn't much that can be done to put this right.  The airlines will look at this as a liability issue ($$$), and there will be quite low limits on the value that can be claimed, as part of the conditions of the ticket (unless a higher value was declared).  There's also the question of whether this stuff met the conditions specified for acceptable checked baggage -- I wonder if this isn't why it has gone astray (though they ought to be able to tell you if that's the problem). 

I hope it surfaces soon. 

This reminds me of the story of some poor researcher who had spent years collecting the feces of some animal in some remote part of the world, only to have it thrown out by the cleaners at his university.  Sometimes crap isn't really crap. 

[scampster]

Oh my gosh, that is horrible! Has she managed to find anyone at the airline that even sympathetically comprehends the situation? Is there someone at the institution who might intervene with the airline? This is much less major, but Sprint kept doing stupid sh!t and cutting off our service (for a data buoy that a shore station calls for data - the buoy collects data constantly but can only hold four days worth without it being sent, so whenever Sprint would mess around with us, if the problem lasted more than four days, we'd lost data). Our accounting person had an inside contact with Sprint and was able to resolve a major issue for us much faster than we were able to on our own - since universities may do a lot of business with a company, sometimes they have a little more leverage than an individual.

Wow, I just can't even imagine how I would feel if I were in her shoes. I'd probably spontaneously break down in tears all day.

I'm glad I'm a physics person, not a biologist, so at the end of field data collection, if I lose my data it is because I didn't back it up in enough places.

[cranefly]

You out the airline. Here, there, everywhere you can. Call the press. Get them some bad publicity and they'll find it asap.

[inthelab]

Too late, but a word to the wise: anything that precious goes with YOU ON BOARD.  Buy it a ticket for its own seat.  Check something else instead.  DO NOT check precious stuff. 

Or ship it FedEx or UPS next Day Air to someone already at the home lab.

[daurousseau]

Word of encouragement: my suitcase showed just showed up on my front porch 14 days after I declared it lost. I had given up any hope.

[gennimom]

I think 14 days will be too late.

[canadatourismguy]

Sorry...I agree that next time, you need to ship it via a delivery service.  The airlines are really brutal in this respect.

[sweetcider]

What would you do?

Start making phone calls.  See if you can find a number for the airlines main offices.  Find out if friends/colleagues/relatives have any connections in the airline and call those people.  Go to your local airport and ask them to double check any place it might be.  Find the local number for the airline desk at the departure airport and any connecting airports and call those places and ask them to double check.  Be on the phone constantly until it's well past the thaw time or the samples are found.

Another idea, if you booked the flight on a credit card, call the credit card's customer service and see if there's anything they can do to help. 

What kind of help can you expect from the airline?

Maybe not much, but if you get the correct person on the phone you may get wonderful help.

And yes, in the future, carry them on!

Good luck!

[tolerantly]

Sad but true.  I never check luggage unless I'm willing to lose whatever it is.  In fact for a recent long trip I UPS'd a few cartons of clothing to my destination rather than pack suitcases and have them turn up 6 days into my trip (or not at all). 

I would get hold of a PR person as high up the food chain as possible and tell them your wife's position, then explain that you will publicize the loss inside the academic community and make sure that the travel offices of every university in the country are aware of how casual they are with checked items, and how -- realistic or not -- the fear of losing their data and samples will turn  the airline into Kryptonite for them.  If there's a fancy-sounding professor who can be brought to bear, good.

[monsterx]

The samples are not mine, but my wife's.  But I kind of feel like they are mine, since I spent the summer watching her dig these things up.  

14 days would be too long, but at least she would get her duty free purchases and dirty underclothes back then :)  And the dry shipper, which is actually kind of expensive.  

I guess the dry shipper should keep them good for a few days, unless somebody decides to open it up and doesn't know what they are doing.  Like customs or security.  It was all oked by the airline before she flew, but who knows what is really going on.  She was planning on going through customs with the dry shipper to make sure everything went ok, or to fix it if it didn't, but that didn't happen.

The airline sent a message that they found her bags, but have only said they are shipping the non-dry shipper one.  Not clear what what means for her samples.  

Obviously, it would be nice to get compensation from the airline, but it is hard to see how they could compensate.   Clearly, they won't pay what it cost to get the samples, and they don't have a real cash value.

Buying a seat for the dry shipper would have been a good idea.  She has had problems with FedEx before though, and didn't want to go that route.  They lost samples for about 2 weeks, before an empty envelope finally showed up.  Couldn't get them to accept responsibilty and they still charged $300 bucks for the "service".  It wasn't such a big problem though; they just had to resend it.

[scampster]

The airline sent a message that they found her bags, but have only said they are shipping the non-dry shipper one.  Not clear what what means for her samples.  

So they are in possession of her samples now? I think this is where she gets on the phone and begs, pleads, and cries until she gets passed up high enough that someone can authorize shipping them. And remember to be nice to everyone along the chain.

[southerntransplant]

Wow.

I lost a poster I was presenting at a big conference once; the airline made me check it. I fortunately had the source material with me and was able to reconstruct it, but future posters I have brought on board and let the airline personnel tell me it's too big. They never have.

Gate checking stuff seems to work better than sending stuff through checked baggage. The few times I've tried to bring my guitar on board (in an airline case), they've gate checked them and managed to find it again as I've disembarked the plane. They don't even make it to the luggage carousel - I just got it back in the jetway.

I'm sorry to hear that. I hope this is recoverable...

[doctor_torrseal]

Baggage doesn't disappear completely, generally.  It gets lost track of, which means it's probably sitting somewhere that some baggage person could discover it if they kept looking, or its tag fell off or something like that.  I think she should keep calling and pestering (politely but firmly), enough so that the airline mounts a special effort to find the box just to make the problem go away.  Repeatedly calling different operators in their baggage department is unlikely to build up enough pressure.  Ideally she should try to force the issue to a supervisor who will be centrally responsible for the problem, and if possible get a name and direct phone number (if there is one) for this person.  I don't know if getting a supervisor or prof to stress the importance of the samples will make much headway with the airline, but feel free to call yourself "Dr. So-and-so" when talking to them.  "This is Dr. Smith and I am calling about my missing samples ..."

The other reason she should keep calling and being insistent is that it's going to feel better than sitting around waiting and not doing anything.

Edit: I forgot to add that shippers, while better, aren't foolproof.  We once had a delicate instrument shipped from Europe to the US, it got lost, and was found after a week or so sitting in the cargo area of an airport in a small, extremely unstable African country, one of those worst-place-in-the-world places.  The address label and barcode were clearly visible - nobody ever got a meaningful explanation of how it happened.

[monsterx]

Now they sent her a text message saying her bags will be delivered today.  So maybe it will be ok.  As long as nothing has been opened, the samples should still be frozen.

She told me she wanted to buy an extra ticket to be able to take the samples as carry-on, but the airline wouldn't let her.  For some reason, they didn't want the liquid nitrogen dry shipper, which looks like a metal canister with all kinds of warning labels, sitting in the passenger compartment.  I can imagine it might worry the other passengers :)